overmatching him. She tried to run, but he grabbed at her, only half-catching her wrist; she spun and tripped on her hem, and in a flail of hair and robes she crashed through the paper screens and fell down the two short wooden steps to the townhouse’s central garden.
She landed on the path that ran around the inside edge of the house, the paper screens falling around her. The impact was enough to bring tears to her eyes. She scrabbled to free herself from the light wooden frames of the screens. Her ankle-length hair was tangled and caught in everything, and she kept kneeling on it and having it wrench painfully at her scalp.
Then the screens were torn away from her, and there was her attacker. In the warm, moonlit night, she could see him better. He was dressed in bandit clothes, and his hair was unkempt, his face swarthy and angry. She slipped out from under his grip, another scream rising from her to wake the household. She got only a few paces across the garden before he caught her, hooking his foot under hers so that she tumbled again, rolling into a flowerbed and cracking her wrist on a rock. Then he was on her, pinning her hands with one arm while she thrashed and kicked.
‘Get off me!’ she cried through gritted teeth, and she felt the impact as one of her kicks connected and the man grunted. She thought for a moment that he might release her, but instead he knelt one leg agonisingly hard on her stomach, driving the breath from her, and he wadded the matchoula-soaked cloth in one hand and brought it to her face. Then she was being smothered, and his relentless palm was moving with the shaking of her head and would not be dislodged. The stinging reek was in her nostrils, on her lips, and her lungs burned for oxygen. She bucked and twisted in panic, but she was small and frail and she did not have the strength to get him off her.
Then, a shriek from somewhere in the house, and running feet thumping across the turf. The pad was pulled away suddenly, the knee released, and Mishani gasped as she sucked in the air, wild-eyed.
But the man who held her had only dropped the pad to pull a knife, and it was already driving towards her throat. Something deep and faster than thought made her shift her shoulders and shove with her knees, now that she had the purchase to do so. She bucked him forward enough so that he automatically put out his arms for balance, his knife-stroke arrested; and an instant later an arrow took him through the eye, the force of the shaft throwing him off her and sending him tumbling into a shallow pool at the base of a rockery.
She scrambled to her feet before he had come to rest, sweeping up the knife that he had dropped and brandishing it as she turned to face the ones who were running across the garden. Panting, dishevelled, her mass of black hair in a muddy mess, she glared at the shadows that came for her and held her blade ready.
‘Mistress Mishani!’ said Chien, the foremost of them. Behind him were three guards, one carrying a bow. At the sound of her name, she raised the dagger to throat-height, daring him to come closer. He scrambled to a halt with his hands raised placatingly before him. ‘Mistress Mishani, it’s me. Chien.’
‘I know who you are,’ she told him, an unforgivable tremble in her voice from the shock of being attacked in such a way. ‘Stay back.’
Chien seemed confused. ‘It’s me,’ he repeated.
‘Your men have failed, Chien,’ she said. ‘If you want to kill me, you will have to do it yourself.’
‘Kill you? I . . .’ Chien said, lost for words. Behind her, she heard a guard call out. Chien looked over her shoulder. ‘Are there more?’ he asked her.
‘How many did you hire?’ she returned.
The second attacker was dragged out behind her into the garden. He was limp. Poison, she guessed. His employer would want no evidence left.
‘Mistress Mishani . . .’ he said, sounding terribly wounded. ‘How could you think this of me?’
‘Come now, Chien,’ she said. ‘You did not get to where you were without seeing all the angles. And nor did I.’
‘Then you have not considered the right ones, it seems,’ Chien said. He sounded desperate to convince her, almost wheedling. ‘I had