Page 25 of Dagger’s Shield

“Épée. The départemental championship. I was thirteen.”

“Were you any good?”

“I was fast. Too angry to be precise. My maître said I fenced like I was settling a score.”

“Were you?”

She was quiet long enough that I thought she wouldn’t answer. “Probably.”

“With whom?”

“There was a large list to pick from. I was thirteen.”

I laughed.

The outline of the room was becoming clear as my eyes adjusted. “Your mother kept all of this. It’s exactly as you left it, I’d wager.”

“To the centimeter. For years, I believed she kept it this way so I would feel more comfortable when I visited. Now, I think she kept it because it’s the one room in the house my father never enters.”

“Why doesn’t he?”

“There is nothing of interest to him in it.”

I added that statement to what I was mentally compiling about Bertrand Valais.

She was quiet for a while, but I heard the smile in her voice when she asked, “What did you want to do before you joined the service? There must have been something.”

“Engines,” I said. “There was a man two streets over from us who rebuilt motorbikes in his garden shed. I spent every Saturday of my childhood handing him spanners.”

“Spanners?”

“Wrenches. I was going to have a shop of my own. Killian Curran, Motorcycles Bought, Sold, and Restored.”

“Like the bike you had in Switzerland.”

“Yes. It was very difficult to leave it behind. I spent years restoring it.”

“What changed your mind?”

“I turned eighteen, and the recruiting office had better posters.”

“You would have been bored within the year.”

“Likely. Though I’d never have known it, would I? Somewhere, there’s a version of me with grease under his nails who thinks a dangerous night is running out of milk.”

“Do you envy him?”

“Not tonight.”

She let that go by, and I didn’t push it. I rolled my head toward her in the dark. “Now you. What did you want?”

“Away.” She didn’t hesitate. “That was the entire ambition. Anywhere that was not here.”

“And once you were gone?”

The pause was longer this time. “To matter somewhere I had chosen. Instead of not mattering somewhere I was born.”

A hundred replies came to mind, and every one of them would’ve made her regret telling me, so I said none of them.