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But he took Sufiyan’s arm anyway.
“You don’t have to talk about it now,” he said before Suf could bite his head off again. “But you will, eventually. If not to me, to Arelia. You can’t stick a knife in someone for the first time and pretend it didn’t—”
“I hated it, all right?” Sufiyan said. “I feel like the only thing I’ve thought about for the past year is death and loss, and now killing, and all I want is to bleeding get away from it. But I’ve just killed a man myself and I can’t reckon with it yet. Maybe one day, but—”
His voice broke, and Quil sighed. “I’m sorry, Sufiyan, I shouldn’t have—”
“Quil—look.” Sufiyan nodded at something beyond Quil, and the prince groaned at the paltry excuse for a distraction.
“I’m apologizing, all right?” Quil said. “It—it seems like you’ve been gone for months now, and I wish we’d talk.”
“Quil—turnaround. Slowly.”
“Maybe you’re angry at me, because I didn’t protect Ruh, but—”
Sufiyan finally met Quil’s gaze. “We clearly both have feelings to discuss,” he said. “But for now, will you shut it and look?”
The prince turned and immediately spotted what had caught Sufiyan’s notice. In front of a tavern with a raised wraparound porch, at a table brightly illuminated by a row of dangling lamps, a woman argued with a young blond man. The woman had dark hair swept into a pile atop herhead. A sharp jaw. Full, heart-shaped lips and cheekbones as keen as a Teluman scim. High red boots.
Sirsha.
Without speaking, Quil and Sufiyan shoved their way across the street toward the tavern. Sufiyan nodded at a cobbler’s stall ahead of them with a wide awning, a few steps from Sirsha’s table. The cobbler was locked in an argument with a customer waving a broken boot heel at him.
Quil made for the left side of the awning, Sufiyan for the right. The shadows were deep enough that anyone looking over from the veranda wouldn’t be able to make out much.
Once ensconced in the dark, the prince eyed the Jaduna at leisure. It was the first time he’d looked at her—really looked—without telling himself to look away. There was something different about her. No—Quil realized. It was the way people looked at her. With wariness.
Jibaut was a dangerous place at night. Sirsha, Quil realized, was one of the reasons why. She wore a belt of knives across her chest, daggers at both hips and in each boot—none of which she’d had on the ship. Her shirt was low-cut, her leather armor close-fitting and made to accentuate her curves. She had a silhouette that would draw the eye of most people with a pulse. Quil noticed a few people looking—all surreptitiously—for there was a boldness to her, a bite.
She didn’t have that amused smirk that had frustrated and fascinated him so much while on the shabka. She was all business.
The prince tried to interpret the cant of her head, the flash of white as she bit her full bottom lip in what could be anything from anxiety to flirtation.
At the thought of the latter, annoyance swept through him.
Sufiyan, who’d sidled up beside him, glanced over. “Jealous?” he whispered.
Quil wasn’t about to lie to Sufiyan, so he shrugged. “Let’s get closer.”
Together, they inched to almost the end of the cobbler’s awning. Rain soaked Quil’s shoulder. He could barely hear the conversation over the downpour.
“—too deep. Let this go, tracker.”
“Not an option,” Sirsha said. “What’swrongwith you, Kade? You’re acting strange. You look awful. Are you ill?”
“You cannot hunt this killer,” the man called Kade said. Indeed, he had heavy pink shadows under his eyes, and the waxy skin of someone who’d been unwell. Still, he was handsome, and the way he looked at Sirsha told Quil that if they weren’t lovers now, they had been in the past. “It’s too dangerous, even for you, Inashi.”
“A murderer is a murderer.” Sirsha sat back, arms crossed. “With weaknesses like anyone else. There must be something in those books of yours about the killer’s magic.”
“I can’t help you. Find someone else.”
“The only person who knows the old lore better than you is a month’s ride south in a bleeding swamp, and youknowhow I feel about swamps. Besides which, the last time I saw her, she told me not to come back—”
“Sirsha—”
“Give me something, Kade. For old times’ sake.”
“Don’t be angry at me. I—I—”
