For ten years previously he had made a name for himself in Helleron, hiring his blade to whoever could meet his fees. The money was nothing; the fights were all. He had thought that he was taking pride in his skills, displayed in all those brawls and formal duels, but now he discovered that he had been waiting to meet the one who could properly challenge him. In Collegium she had found him.

After they had fought, after she had stepped out of the fight so abruptly, she had left him so inflamed, so fiercely alive, that he had even spared Stenwold’s Spider traitress. In that moment it had not mattered, because only she signified – only this woman who had walked in and out of his world in those brief minutes, to scar it forever.

Somewhere deep inside, he was now out of balance, as though he had been struck, back then, and was still reeling. Seventeen years of penance he had endured, in Helleron and other places: penance for betraying his race by consorting with the Spider Atryssa; penance for trusting in her false heart; and, at the last, penance for mistrusting her, who had died while being true to him. And I loved her, and she did not betray me after all. It was the most jagged wound of them all that it had been he who abandoned her, in the end. How she would have hated me, had she lived.

His eyes were now fixed on Felise’s – her eyes that were almond-shaped, and shifted from blue to green even as he watched and waited for her to move.

It has been so long. His kind bore some of their scars forever, but it had been so long. And I have broken the rules before. Felise’s face remained impassive. He could read nothing in it. He sensed no tension there, could foretell no gathering strike.

He had been dead, he realized, those seventeen years. Only Stenwold’s return and the discovery of Tynisa had awoken him to some kind of half-life, but beneath it all some part of him had slumbered on.