I walked long enough that Lisirra was just a chain of lights in the distance. For a minute I wanted to turn back, just drop the vials and run straight to the garden district and beg my apologies.
Suddenly that medicine scent, the one from the night before, saturated the air.
I stopped walking. The wind howled, blowing my hair into my eyes. I clutched my knife in one hand and stuck my other hand in my pocket and waited.
The shadows lengthened, curled, expanded. I whirled around, looking for a pair of glowing eyes, a flick of dark fabric. Nothing.
I wrapped my hand around the vials.
The world was suddenly too big.
And then he was there. I didn't see him, but I felt him, a shiver of cold breath on the back of my neck. I spun around, kicking up a spray of moonlit sand, and shoved the knife into my dress sash.
A flash of skin.
I pulled the vials out, broke them between my palms, and threw the whole thing, blood and magic and glass, in the direction of that skin. I screamed the invocation, the words still clumsy on my tongue.
The light erupted clean and bright. In the desert darkness it was the exact same color as the southern seas. It shot up like a fountain toward the sky. For a few seconds the entire desert glowed green.
And then something happened. The light didn't shower across the sand as it should. It didn't change into a doorway and disappear. It simply blinked out, like a candle between Mama's thumb and forefinger as she said goodnight, and I was plunged back into darkness and there was the assassin standing in front of me, his eyes – dark tonight, normal, not blue at all – narrowed above his desert mask.
I screamed. I didn't have time to think about the failure of the woman's magic. I didn't have time to think about anything. I just screamed and screamed, and the assassin stared at me with a sword glinting like starlight at his side.
I stumbled away. The sword flashed, sang, cut a long gash in my right forearm. I fell down into the sand. He darted toward me, and I drew up Papa's strength and in one movement yanked my knife out from my sash and implanted it squarely in the assassin's thigh. He stumbled backward, dragging the knife from my grasp, and I thought he looked a little stunned.
No time for thinking, though. I dove forward, grabbed the knife again. He swung his sword down at me and I was able to roll away, sand coating my face, stinging my eyes. I skittered backward across the desert like a crab. I thought the assassin was moving kind of slow for an assassin. Maybe the magic had done something after all. Or maybe he felt sorry for me. That sort of thing happens among cutthroats more often than you'd expect.
The assassin reached into some dark place in his armor and I flung the knife at him, in my panic not taking care to throw it properly. The hilt bounced off his chest. He stopped and looked at me. All I could see were his eyes, but they had a lightness in them that made me think he was laughing, which got me angry instead of scared. I reached over and grabbed the knife, jumped up to my feet, swung my head around, looking for something to use as a weapon or something to use as a trick. Nothing.
Nothing except a weird slithery motion through the sand, black against the black night. Then a pair of narrow white fangs. It was coming up behind the assassin, creeping up close to his ankles, but he didn't take no mind of it. Too busy pulling some murderous enchantment out of his cloak.
I ain't never liked snakes. You don't see enough of 'em on the water to get used to 'em, really, and when I saw this one I shrieked without meaning to and stuck my knife clean through it, cause my fear had turned me into a fool who only acted on reflex. Darkness pooled out onto the sand, and the snake flopped a few times and then died.
The whole night went still. I swear it was like the assassin and me were the only two people left in the world.
The assassin said something in that beautiful-terrible language of his. But he didn't try to kill me, which was what I expected. I pulled the knife out of the snake and wiped the blood off on the hem of my dress. The assassin kept staring at the snake like he'd never seen one before. I took this opportunity to attempt an escape, and began creeping back over the sand on my hands and knees.
"Stop," the assassin said, and I froze, sure I was about to die.
Footsteps thudded on the sand. He came and stood beside me, and when I looked up at him, half-forcing myself to meet his eyes, he pulled the mask away from his face.
He wasn't a ghoul at all, just a man, like the shopkeeper had said, and younger than I would've expected, though still a bit older than me, maybe by about five or so years. His entire left cheek was scarred, ripples and folds in the flesh as if from a fire or maybe magic. Beneath the scar he was handsome, though, almost as handsome as Tarrin of the Hariri, so I didn't exactly relax.
"Did you save my life?" he asked.
"Maybe." I figured in a situation like this, ambivalence is always best.
"Why did you do that?"
I looked at the dead snake and back up at his scarred face. "Seemed like a good idea at the time."
The assassin frowned, and it twisted his face up in a way I found interesting. I waited for him to pull out his sword and slice my throat, but instead he sat down on the sand beside me. He draped his arms over his knees and stared morosely off in the distance.
"I wish you hadn't done that," he said.
"Um… I'm sorry?" I waited for a few minutes, watching him. Then I asked, "Are you going to kill me or what?" I figured I might as well get it out of the way.
He looked over at me, moonlight flashing across his dark eyes. I decided I rather liked the look of him, which was a bit of a problem, all things considered.
"No," he said, sounding glum.
"Oh." Relief flooded over me, and anybody with any lick of sense would have picked up and ran back toward Lisirra. Instead, I opened my mouth. "Why not?"
He hesitated. "You saved my life." A pause. "From an asp, of all things."
"That's the dumbest reason I ever heard."