air and finally got both hands against his chest and pushed with all her remaining

strength.

"VREE!".

"Bannon?"

"VREE, STOP IT! YOU'RE KILLING ME!".

Gasping for breath, she shoved a tangle of blankets aside and threw herself out

of the bed. She was alone in the room. Alone.

"No! Bannon?"

It took a moment to find him amidst the terror, hers and his.

"Bannon, are you all right?"

His voice shook. "You tried to push me out. Why, Vree? Why?"

"I didn't mean it." All at once, her legs couldn't hold her and she sank to her

knees. "It was a dream. I didn't mean it. I didn't mean it." Her hand came up to

clutch the onyx pendant that hung between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. But there was no strength there. This was not a battlefield Jiir ruled.

The door opened, and she whirled to stare into the soft light of a shielded lamp.

"I heard you cry out..." Gyhard's voice trailed off as she turned and laid her head on her knees, exposing the vulnerable curve of her spine.

"Go away." She forced her voice to carry as far as the door. When she heard him leave, when she heard the door close, she started to tremble.

"Vree?"

"I didn't mean it."

"Want to talk about it?"

Vree scowled at nothing. "About what?"

"About last night."

"Why?"

Gyhard shrugged although he knew she couldn't see the gesture. "I just

wondered if you often had nightmares like that."

Never like that. Never so obvious. a.s.sa.s.sins examined their dreams for messages from the G.o.ddess, warnings of weaknesses or fears that could rise up to defeat them as they moved alone in the darkness. But to learn that Bannon

was her weakness was merely to relearn something she'd known most of her life.

"Slaughter it, Vree, it's perfectly normal for you to want me out of your head. Just don't do it again and stop flogging yourself over it." Bannon, once his terror had calmed, had found his balance with practiced ease. As usual, he'd placed himself at the center of the problem and looked no deeper.

Deeper. Vree had glanced once into the shadowed depths of her heart where dark desire hid and refused to look again.

Gyhard watched the tiny movements of muscles beneath the surprisingly delicate angle of her jaw and found the answer to his question. So her sleep is not entirely peaceful. Somehow he doubted that the lives she'd taken over the years haunted her. "Still sane?"

The expression she threw at him held anger but no taint of madness. "Why are you asking?"

"Curiosity."

"Eat it."

They rode in silence for the rest of the morning. He couldn't get the image of the vulnerable curve of her back out of his mind.

At noon, they stopped in a small village that seemed to have grown up merely because it was exactly half a day's leisurely travel from Kiaz. Oblivious to Gyhard's indulgent smile and pig noises made by her brother, Vree devoured a bowl of honeyed figs and felt her mood lift a little. Perhaps there'd be a way out after all.

When the sun had moved a safe distance past its zenith, they remounted and continued toward the Capital. The South Road was deserted, and Vree actually found herself relaxing into the movement of the horse. For a glorious moment,

they became one creature, not two, and she began to understand what Gyhard saw in this method of transportation.

And then she saw the rider, hidden by a sharp bend in the road until he was too

close to avoid.

"What is it?" Gyhard demanded as she stiffened.

"Army courier," Vree snapped, squinting to bring the sunbursts on the flapping

pennant into focus. "I can't tell which army."

"What are the odds you'd be known?"

"Long," she admitted, but shifted to ready a dagger.

The courier was almost on them, close enough to count the sunbursts on his

tunic. Six sunbursts. Sixth Army.

"s.h.i.t!"

"Probably on the way back from telling the Emperor about Ghoti."

"Lousy slaughtering timing!"

The eyes under the crested helm flicked toward them as the courier pa.s.sed, then

widened with sudden recognition. "Bannon?"

"Avor," said the Bannon in her head, not the one wrongly identified beside her.

Avor put his heels to his horse just a heartbeat too late.

Gyhard had never seen anyone move so quickly. One moment Vree sat stiffly beside him, the next instant she launched herself from the saddle, slammed into the startled courier and rode him to the ground, landing almost impossibly in a crouch straddling the body.

No, not a body. Not yet. He had the breath knocked out of him by the fall but appeared to be unhurt. Before he could move, a dagger pressed against his throat.

"They think you're dead, both of you. You were killed getting out of Ghoti!" By the time Avor's brain caught up with his mouth, the damage had been done. The information he'd just blurted out had been the only thing keeping him alive. "I won't tell!" His heels dug impotent trenches in the dust.

Vree nodded. "I know."

Avor paled, wet his lips, and somehow found the courage to face the inevitable with dignity. "Don't leave me for the crows," he said softly.

Slitting a throat does not bring instant death. Consciousness can linger as the heart pumps blood out onto the ground and the lungs fill with scarlet froth. The razor edge of Vree's dagger flashed through soft tissue too quickly for pain, found the spine, slipped between two ridges of bone, and ended it. There was, at that moment, no separation between herself and her brother. It made it easier.

"Blood shared, sister-mine."

She felt Gyhard's eyes on her as she stood. "Get the horses." Sheathing her dagger, she bent to drag the body farther off the road.

"What are you going to do?" The curve of her back as she'd bent over the messenger had been almost identical to the curve that haunted him-except this time, there had been nothing at all vulnerable about it.

Vree didn't answer. A grove of trees up ahead would provide both shelter from prying eyes along the road and dirt deep enough to bury Avor and the gear they'd stripped from his horse.

"We leave the mare outside the next village we come to. I'll give good odds that whoever finds it will keep their mouth shut."

"Your commanders will still know he's disappeared."

Vree shrugged. "Nothing to connect him to us." With a silent prayer that the G.o.ddess would take the courier into her company, even though he hadn't exactly died in battle, she lifted the onyx pendant over her head and dropped it onto the crimson gap at Avor's throat. Her life had been Bannon and the army. Now there was only Bannon. "And they're not my commanders anymore."

"At least you were right about Emo."

"Thank you. That makes me feel so much better." Avor began to disappear beneath double handfuls of earth.

Bannon remained silent for a long time. "So now what'll we do?"

"Save the prince." She threw a rock into the hole. "After that, I don't care."

"We don't need the army, sister-mine. You'll see. It was like a weight around our

necks, holding us down."

Her hand lifted to where the pendant had hung for so many years. She clutched

at nothing, then spread her fingers and began to smooth the grave, blurring the edges into the surrounding dirt. Working across from her, Gyhard frowned. He would give a great deal to know what Vree and her brother were discussing. "Why, when as far as he knew he was facing a pair of deserting a.s.sa.s.sins and had every right-or even obligation under the law-to kill us, didn't our young messenger go for his crossbow?" he asked when they were once again on the road. "Crossbows take time to load. He didn't have that time and he knew it. His only hope was escape."

"Not much of a hope."

She snorted softly. "No."

Gyhard couldn't quite identify the new tone in her voice. It sounded almost

melancholy. "Does it bother you that you killed a comrade?"

Her profile tilted enough to fix him in a scornful glare. "Having my throat slit in

the dark would bother me a lot more. If Avor told the garrison that he saw us, they'd send out comrades harder to kill."

"We're not so very different, then, you and I. I also kill to stay alive."

If he'd hoped to provoke a reaction, he was doomed to disappointment.

"Everyone kills to stay alive. Even if it's only meat for the table."