to cross his face before both of Widdershins's boot heels did likewise. When all was said and done, and the dust—or rather, spray—had settled, he lay sprawled on his back in the street, Widdershins sitting comfortably atop him. The initial impact might or might not have been enough to render him unconscious, but the fact that Shins currently had one foot resting heavily on his throat removed all doubt.
“Evening,” she said as Evrard stalked closer, fists and jaw quivering.
“Showing off?” he spat.
“Uh, no.” Not exactly, anyway. “Nobody here worth bothering to impress.”
“I could have taken them!”
“Sure. If you'd noticed them. And if they were normal robbers.” She rose, stretched hard until something in her back popped, and then began wandering in the same direction Evrard had been heading. Given no other option—especially since that remained the way he had to go—the aristocrat joined her.
“‘Normal robbers’?” he demanded.
“Yeah. As in, robbers who plan to rob you. Like normal.”
“And what else would they have been?”
“Spies for Lisette, who knows you were involved in the fight against Iruoch and might have noticed you asking questions. In which case, sure, you could still have taken them—unless their job was just to follow you and confirm where we were, and that you were working with us, in which case you'd never have known they were here. Well, until the Finders showed up to stab us in our sleep. Probably with fire.”
“Stab us with…?”
“This way, they don't see where you're going, and they didn't really see who or what hit them.”
“So which are you?” Evrard asked.
“Huh?”
“A who or a what?”
“Cute,” Widdershins said. “A few years of practice, just like that, and you could really be marginally less unfunny.”
“I…” He glanced abruptly downward, something having snagged his attention. “You're wearing a rapier.”
“So are you,” she pointed out.
“Yes, but you did not have a rapier when you left. In fact, you asked me to lend you one of mine.”
She shrugged. “And you said no. So I borrowed from someone else.”
“I see. And does this someone else know you ‘borrowed’ his sword?”
“Well, by now he probably does…”
Footsteps, the very sporadic murmur of other pedestrians, the faint sizzle as the occasional bead of water worked its way inside the burning streetlamps. Otherwise, silence.
“I'm afraid I wasted my day,” Evrard began. “I didn't learn any—”
Two raised fingers and a quick “Shh!” stopped him cold.
“Not now,” Shins told him. “Wait until everyone's gathered. Then we can all report to each other at once.”
“But I just told you I don't have anything to—”
“So wait until we're all together and then don't report anything.”
Evrard actually swayed, appearing almost drunk. “You want me to wait,” he said, slowly and clearly, perhaps making sure they were both speaking the same language. “And tell the group I've got nothing. Without telling you, alone, right now, that I've got nothing.”
“Precisely.”
“For the love of the gods, why?!”
Shins stared at the man as though he'd gone mad for even asking. “I don't want to lose track of all the details.”
Once again, footsteps, the very sporadic murmur of other pedestrians, the faint sizzle as the occasional bead of water worked its way inside the burning streetlamps. Otherwise, more silence.
“How did I let myself get talked into this?”
He hadn't really been asking Shins, hadn't even meant to mutter it aloud; it was just another repetition of what had become the evening's anthem. Yet, without even looking his way, Widdershins answered.
“Because you and your family spent almost a decade doing nothing but playing at manners and propriety as ‘guests’ in another country, yes? Followed almost immediately by your silly obsession with getting revenge on me.”
“Silly—?! You stole dozens of our family heirlooms! Gods’ sakes, Lisette only hates you because you beat her to robbing my—!”
“Now that that's all behind you, you haven't the faintest wiggling idea what to do with yourself or your life. You're bored, you're completely aimless, and you're looking for something to do that actually matters.”
Evrard rocked, raising fingertips to his cheek as though he'd been slapped. “You have no idea what you're talking about!”
“Oh.” Another of Widdershins's shrugs. “Okay.”
“You don't!” he insisted.
“Okay. And Lisette's a few strands short of a mop, anyway. She'd have found some other reason to hate me. No reason to blame yourself.”
The aristocrat roared something that, at closest, was related to genuine words solely by marriage, and stormed ahead, his rapier an angry and twitching tail, with nearly enough force to leave an Evrard-shaped hole in the fog. Shins stood, blinking, in his wake.
“What'd I