The Second She Could Not Refuse

Itzel Vargas had once been the finest blade in the city of Sallowmere, and now she taught the fat sons of cloth merchants not to stab themselves in the foot.

The salle smelled of chalk and adolescent sweat. She stood with her arms crossed while young Perrin lunged at the pell like a man swatting a wasp, and she did not correct him, because correction cost extra and his father had paid only for the watching. This was what the duel four years ago had left her: not dead, which had been the wager, but worse — disgraced, her name struck from the Guild rolls, her reputation handed over to the gossips like a coin to a beggar. She had spared the man she fought. The city had never forgiven her for it. In Sallowmere a master who would not kill was a master who could not, and a master who could not was nothing.

So she watched Perrin flail, and counted the hours until she could close the shutters.

The girl came in at the last bell, breathless, hood thrown back, no older than the merchants' sons and twice as serious. She did not ask whether this was the salle of Itzel Vargas. She said it like an accusation. "They told me you were finished," she said. "I came anyway, because everyone else is afraid."

"Of what?" Itzel did not uncross her arms.

"Of the Margrave's man. Sabre Aurelle." The girl's chin was up, but her hands had found each other for company. "He has named my brother a thief.My brother is at sea and cannot answer, and a name unanswered for is a name lost. The challenge stands until the next new moon. After that the slander is law." She swallowed. "I am sixteen and I have never held a blade. So I am asking you. Stand in my brother's place. Answer Aurelle for our name."

Itzel laughed before she could stop herself, and was ashamed of it when she saw the girl flinch. "Aurelle has killed nine men in formal challenge," she said. "Eleven, if you count the two who died of the wounds later, and you should, the city does. He does not lose. He does not tire. I am a teacher of boys, child. I would be answering your brother's name with my own corpse."

"They said you were a coward." The girl said it without heat, watching her. "I see now it isn't true. You are only tired." She laid something on the bench between them — a thin chain, a locket, a brother's face inside it, salt-stained. "Keep it. If you say no, throw it in the harbour where he is. But if there is one blade in this city that ever spared a life on purpose, it is yours, and a name worth more than a life is exactly the kind of thing a person like that might still fight for."

She left. The locket lay open on the bench, the painted brother smiling at a ceiling he had never seen.

Itzel looked at it for a long time. Then she went to the cabinet she had not opened in four years, and took out the blade she had sworn she would never draw again, and found that her hand, traitorous and certain, still knew exactly where the grip would be.