Bleeding the Heir

A man with an open vein is just meat waiting for a bucket.

I sit on the edge of the cedar dressing chest in my locked quarters, wrapping four yards of coarse unbleached linen around my right hand.

Between the second and third turns of the cloth, I tuck a four-inch strip of tempered spring-steel wire.

I pulled the wire ten minutes ago from the rusted regulator gear of the ceiling smoke damper. It is thin as a horsehair, curved like a scorpion's tail, and grooved along the spine. I scored the outer tip with the edge of Nokuto's bone token until the metal flared into a jagged micro-barb. A drop of oil on the base keeps the coil from chewing through my skin before I want it to.

If I drive it a sixteenth of an inch into living flesh, the spiral groove wicks blood straight into the hollow core.

Five drops. That is all the arterial lock in the high solar requires.

Five drops of Mokude blood to crack the safe, seize the master schematics of the compound, and disarm the six barrels of Hiraga powder ticking beneath the south foundations.

Sixty-eight hours left until dawn on Day Six.

The clock does not care about my wedding vows.

I tuck the tail of the linen wrap into my wrist-band, flexing my fingers twice. The steel barb sits flush against the second knuckle of my middle finger, hidden beneath the rough hemp weave.

Pressure on the knuckle extends the tip. Release pulls it back.

A dirty trick from the scrap pits of the western ruins. The kind of weapon you use when the other person outweighs you by four stone and carries three feet of folded steel.

I stand up and kick the heavy oak door with the heel of my boot.

The wood booms like a temple drum.

"Open the latch," I call out.

Outside in the stone corridor, an iron bolt grinds through its housing. The door swings wide.

Two Mokude sentries stand on the landing in studded boiled-leather coats, their polearms crossed at the threshold. Behind them stands Toraku.

The new yard commander is shorter than Rebato, wider across the shoulders, and missing half his left ear from an iron sliver at Takamine. He does not wear silk. He smells of dry tallow, pickled radish, and cold sweat.

"The lady is supposed to remain in her quarters," Toraku says. His voice sounds like two river stones grinding together in an empty bucket.

"The marriage pact guarantees the Hiraga retinue daily access to the central yard," I say, stepping right up to the crossed spear shafts. "Or did Sashiro forget to write that into your duty roster?"

Toraku looks at my wrapped knuckles. His scarred brow twitches.

"The retainers drill at noon," he says. "Not brides."

"Then bring a timber and show me how the Mokude fall down," I say.

Toraku's jaw tightens. A veteran does not like being mocked by someone who weighs less than his spare saddle.

He turns on his heel and jerks his chin toward the stone stairs.

"Down," he mutters. "And keep your hands out of your sleeves."

·  ·  ·

The central courtyard is twenty paces of packed yellow gravel hemmed in by four stories of sheer basalt walls.

Cold mountain air drops straight down the chimney of the fortress, smelling of wet slate, horse manure, and pine smoke. Sleet dusts the perimeter flags.

Twenty Mokude retainers are stripped to their gray training tunics, swinging heavy oak practice blades in unison. The crack of wood against wood echoes off the high stone like butcher's cleavers on bone.

They stop the second my boots hit the gravel.

Silence drops over the yard.

Twenty pairs of dark eyes fix on my blue wool tunic. They know who poisoned Rebato at the feast. They know why their former commander is lying in the infirmary with a hollow silver tube jammed into his windpipe.

None of them move. None of them smile.

Toraku walks to the weapon rack beside the stable gate. He pulls a double-weighted oak timber from the peg and tosses it through the air.

I catch the grip with my left hand.

The balance is terrible. The timber is four pounds of unvarnished mountain ash, front-heavy and notched along the striking edge.

"We do not keep ladies' daggers on the rack," Toraku says, folding his thick arms over his chest.

"I noticed," I say, turning the ash timber in my grip. "You also do not wash your practice vests. The wool smells like a drowned mule."

Two young retainers in the back row stiffen.

Toraku does not take the bait. He steps back to the edge of the gravel, spatters a mouthful of brown tobacco juice into the dirt, and raises his hand.

"Form two lines," he barks at his men. "Ignore the stray."

The men begin their forms again.

I step onto the open sand in the center of the ring.

My body is cold. My fingers ache from the mountain frost. But my pulse settles into that flat, icy rhythm I learned in the ash ruins, where an extra breath before a strike gets your throat crushed with a pry bar.

I do not look at the retainers.

I look at the north gallery.

On the third-tier balcony, leaning against the carved stone railing eighty feet above the yard, stands Sashiro.

He wears a sleeveless black tunic over tight training trousers, his dark hair tied back with a strip of raw leather. His bare arms are corded with lean muscle, crisscrossed with pale, jagged scars from five years of skirmishes along the border.

He is not watching his soldiers.

He is watching me.

Our eyes meet across the open drop.

He does not call out. He does not wave Toraku off. He turns, slips over the stone rail, and catches the iron drainage pipe running down the wall.

He drops twenty feet to the second-tier buttress, hits the stone without a sound, and vaults down the final fifteen feet to the gravel.

He lands on the balls of his feet, three paces from my left shoulder.

The retainers stop drilling instantly. They step back, forming a wide, silent circle around the sand.

"You are noisy for an assassin," Sashiro says.

His voice is quiet, carried on the cold draft. He smells of bitter cedar and cold iron.

"I am not an assassin," I say, resting the heavy ash timber against my shoulder. "Assassins work in the dark for coin. I am a scavenger. I work where the trash is thickest."

"And you came to my yard to scavenge wood chips?"

"I came to see if the Mokude fight as poorly as they build fireplaces."

A dry twitch touches the corner of his mouth.

Not a smile. A warning.

"Rebato thought you were soft," Sashiro says. He steps toward the weapon rack, selects a straight ash timber with a bound leather hilt, and spins it once in his right hand. The wood cuts the freezing air with a sharp hiss. "Rebato is currently breathing through a reed."

"Rebato drank bad wine," I reply. "His constitution was weak."

"He was an idiot," Sashiro says, turning back to face me. "He tried to poison an ash-picker who spent ten years eating roots out of burned cellars."

He drops his left foot back, settling his weight into a low, balanced stance.

Two paces between us.

The space feels tight. Suffocating.

"Show me what your brother taught you before he died in the mud," Sashiro says.

The mention of Nokuto's name sends a spike of hot venom through my ribs.

My fingers tighten on the ash grip.

Keep your head, I tell myself. Anger gets you killed. Precision gets the blood.

I do not wait for him to count.

I lunge forward, driving the tip of my heavy timber straight at his sternum.

Sashiro does not flinch. He pivots half an inch to the left, letting my strike slide harmlessly past his ribs, and cracks the flat of his timber down across my knuckles.

Pain explodes in my left wrist.

I drop the ash stick. It hits the gravel with a dull thud.

Before I can recover my balance, his left hand shoots out, catching my right shoulder in an iron grip. He trips my lead leg with a sweeping hook of his boot and drives me hard into the sand.

The impact knocks the wind out of my lungs.

Gravel bites through my tunic, digging into my spine.

I roll instantly, kicking dirt toward his eyes with my right boot, and scramble back to my feet.

Sashiro does not chase. He stands over my fallen practice timber, his ash blade resting loose against his thigh, watching me with cold, clinical interest.

"Hiraga form," he says, shaking his head. "Reckless. Overextended. You throw your entire weight into the first thrust because you expect the enemy to run."

"The enemies in the ruins usually had the sense to run," I spit out, wiping gravel from my chin with my left sleeve.

My right hand stays tucked close to my hip.

The spring-steel wire inside the linen wrap is intact. The barb has not slipped.

"Pick it up," Sashiro says, kicking my timber across the sand toward my boots.

I pick it up with my left hand.

My left wrist throbs, the skin already swelling where his practice blade struck. Good. That gives me an excuse to favor my right side.

"Again," he says.

I step forward.

This time, I stay low.

I keep my knees bent, my center of gravity down near the gravel, circling to his left.

Sashiro tracks me with minimal movement, his boots pivoting in the dirt with effortless precision. He is faster than me. He has twice my reach and three times my upper-body strength. In a fair bout with wooden blades, he can break my ribs in ten seconds.

I do not intend to fight fair.

I feint high with the ash timber, aiming for his temple.

Sashiro brings his guard up to parry.

The moment his wood rises, I drop the strike, tucking my shoulder and driving my left elbow straight toward his solar plexus.

He reads it instantly.

He shifts his hips back, absorbs the blow with his forearm, and brings the butt of his timber down toward my collarbone.

I do not retreat.

I lean into the blow.

The heavy wood catches the meat of my left shoulder. The shock travels down my ribs, sharp and hot, stealing my breath.

My body screams to pull away.

I ignore it.

I close the final six inches between us, stepping inside his guard until my chest is pressed against his ribs.

His eyes widen by a fraction.

He did not expect me to take the hit.

His right hand drops from his weapon, reaching around my neck to lock my head against his shoulder and finish the throw.

Now.

I drive my right hand up between our chests.

I do not make a fist. I cup his right forearm with my wrapped palm, thumb pressed flat against his wrist, and jam the second knuckle of my middle finger into the soft skin on the inside of his arm.

I press the knuckle down. Hard.

The hidden steel barb shoots through the linen weave.

The sharp edge catches his flesh just below the wrist-bone, slicing a clean two-inch furrow through skin and vein.

Sashiro stiffens.

A sharp intake of air hisses through his teeth.

Blood wells from the cut, dark and hot.

The spiral groove of the wire drinks the flow instantly. Capillary action pulls the fresh blood into the hollow core, saturating the inner hemp coil inside my palm.

One second. Two seconds.

The blood soaks through to my skin, scalding hot against my calluses.

Then Sashiro's muscle twitches under the pain.

His massive forearm flexes, clamping down on my hand with crushing force.

Snap.

The brittle spring-steel wire breaks under the shear stress.

A tiny metallic tink vibrates against my palm bones.

Panic spikes through my throat.

If the broken wire falls onto the gravel, Toraku and twenty retainers will see the scavenged metal. They will know I rigged a concealed blade.

I do not pull my hand away.

I curl my fingers inward with feral speed, trapping the snapped, blood-soaked wire fragment inside the cup of my wrapped palm, and slide my knuckles back along his forearm.

"Splinter," I gasp out, forcing my voice to crack with fake shock. "Your timber has a split grip."

Sashiro does not look at his arm.

He looks straight into my face.

His dark eyes are black as wet coal, dilated with sudden, violent intensity.

He drops his practice timber.

His right hand shoots up, fingers wrapping around my throat with bruising strength, and he drives me backward across the yard.

My heels drag through the gravel.

Five paces. Ten paces.

My back slams against the freezing basalt wall of the north portico with bone-jarring force.

The breath leaves my body in a ragged gasp.

Sashiro pins me to the stone.

His chest is flush against mine, rising and falling in harsh, heavy heaves. His right thigh is wedged between my knees, locking my legs against the masonry. His left hand grips my chin, thumbs pressing into the hollows of my jaw until my head is tilted back against the cold granite.

His face is two inches from mine.

He is bleeding.

A steady trickle of dark crimson runs down the inside of his right forearm, dripping from his wrist onto the shoulder of my blue tunic.

The smell of his blood fills my nose—metallic, bitter, thick with mountain iron.

"You took a blow to the collarbone just to get inside my reach," he whispers.

His voice is rough, low, vibrating against my skin.

"I told you," I choke out, my throat tight under his fingers. "Hiraga do not run."

"You are bleeding me on my own sand, wife."

"A bad grip on a cheap stick," I say, my voice steady despite the pressure on my windpipe. "Tell your armorer to sand his timber before you bring it into the yard."

His thumb drags across my bottom lip, pressing hard against the flesh until I taste copper.

He does not let go.

He leans closer, his breath hot against my cheek in the freezing mountain wind.

Twenty Mokude retainers stand ten paces away, watching their heir pin his bride to the stone wall. None of them dare to step forward. Toraku stands frozen on the edge of the gravel, his hand resting on his sword pommel, waiting for the order to cut me down.

Sashiro does not give the order.

He looks down at his bleeding forearm, then back into my eyes.

A dark, dangerous spark flickers in the depths of his gaze—the look of a wolf that just realized the sheep in his pen has teeth.

"You have five minutes to get to your quarters before Toraku locks the gate," he murmurs against my ear.

He releases my throat.

He steps back, shaking the blood from his wrist with a sharp flick of his hand.

"Toraku," Sashiro calls out without looking away from me. "Burn that rack of practice timbers. The wood is rotten."

"Yes, lord," Toraku calls back.

I stay pressed against the stone wall for three seconds, drawing cold air into my bruised lungs.

My left shoulder screams where his timber struck. My jaw aches where his fingers dug into the bone.

Under the bloody linen wrap on my right palm, the snapped fragment of steel wire sits pressed against my flesh.

Soaked in his living blood.

I push off the wall, step past the silent retainers, and walk toward the inner stairs without looking back.

One key secured.

Now I just have to open the safe before the powder blows us to hell.