Athel the Grinner, I realized as I met his eye, was done. There was nothing more we could do to make him talk; nothing left he was willing to tell us before he died. Letting Ioclaudia’s name out had probably been an accident, or a gift, and he wasn’t about to let that happen again-his gaze told me as much.

I crouched down beside him, keeping my knees out of the blood that covered the floor. He blinked his good eye slowly, briefly. After a moment, I realized he was winking.

I reached for my own blade and found I still had Shatters’s knife in my hand. Athel followed my look, then turned his lone eye back to me. He grinned as I cut his throat.

When I came walking back from the barrel, Shatters and his two boys were waiting. One of the apprentices had refilled the bucket. Shatters’s vomit-stained shirt was gone, revealing a mixture of knobby muscles and old scars scattered across his torso. Water still clung to his head and chest from where he had rinsed himself off.

“That was stupid,” Shatters said. A knuckle popped.

I didn’t say anything-I just rested my hand on the blued steel of my rapier guard and turned it to catch the light. It was sheer bravado; I wasn’t nearly good enough to take three of them at once. With luck, I might hold them off while I yelled to Degan for help.

Shatters followed my movement and smiled. “Jumpy? Ought to be, but I ain’t talking about my bath.” He gestured behind me. “I meant your meat back there. You shouldn’t have dusted him-I could have gotten more.”

“He was done talking.”

“So you say. I say he had more in him.” Shatters tsked and laid a thumb across one of his fingers. “Such a waste. I could’ve made that meat squeal”-pop-“till it was music.”

“Make music on your own time.” I wasn’t about to try to explain what I had seen in Athel’s gaze-Shatters took too much joy in his work to admit anyone could outlast him. “Just clean the place up and make sure the body’s found.”