"He has the case," she says. Steady. Just at my shoulder now. She has come up beside me without my hearing the floor under her. "Black leather, under the coat. Gideon told me before he died."
The blade twitches against him. I feel the give of skin. A bead lifts under the edge.
"You kill him here, and the case burns. We have the marks. We don't have the originals. They die with him, in his pocket, in a fortress no one's allowed to dig out for a year. He gets one last fire."
"He earned worse than fire."
"Yes. And I want it for him. I want you to do it. I want to do it. But the people in the field don't get the truth out of his throat."
The blade does not move, nor does my hand. The whole of me is held very still against the thing I have wanted since I dragged myself out a breach. He's right here. He's exactly the height my arm has been measuring without permission. Varek breathes out through his nose. He's smiling, almost. Not enjoyment. Recognition.
"She's good for you," he says, soft. "I told her so."
I almost open his throat for the sentence alone.
Corrine's hand comes to my wrist. Not pulling. Just present, warm through the soot. "Leoric. The case."
I drop him. He hits the floor, catching himself with his palm and is already turning toward the broken door beyond the column. His second guard—I had counted two, the third was behind the column, I should have counted three—steps from the shadow with a crossbow already half raised, and the angle is not on me. It's on her.
I move quickly, getting between the bolt and Corrine and feel the strike take me at the seam above the right hip where thearmor narrows for movement. It goes deeper than a bolt should. The shaft is short. The head is wide. I know what it is before my legs do, a council household quarrel, designed for armor at close range, and the floor changes its mind about being beneath me.
I go down on the side that hasn't been touched. Corrine catches my shoulder and my head before either reaches stone. Her face is above me, very close, soot at her temple and something in her mouth that hasn't come out yet, and for one second I can't find air.
"Leoric." Her hand is at the hip wound, pressing. "Leoric, look at me."
I listen.
"Don't you dare." It comes out of her cracked. "Don't you dare do this here."
"Case." My voice is somewhere I don't trust. "He has the case."
She doesn't turn. Her hand stays where it is, and the other comes up under my jaw to hold my face toward hers as if angle alone will keep me on the side of the room with her. Beyond her shoulder I see Varek at the broken door, on his feet, the guard with the crossbow drawing him through it. They go down—not out. Down. Toward the deeper stair. Toward the lower archive, where the originals still lie behind a door my men are bleeding to hold, and the pitch under the foundations. He's going to burn it from beneath while he carries the last of it out the back.
"Up." I get a hand under me. The wound argues. I argue back. "Corrine. Up."
"You're bleeding into your boot."
"I know."
"You can't run."
"I'm not running." I get my weight under me with her arm at my back, and the room shifts and then steadies because I will not allow it to do otherwise. "I'm going to walk. Slowly. Behind him."
Whatever she's reading in my face, she doesn't argue with it. She tucks her shoulder under my arm on the bad side and takes my weight without making a show of it.
"Then we walk," she says.
The arch above the audience hall lets go of one of its stones. It hits the floor where I was standing and breaks into three pieces. We are already past it. The stair to the lower archive opens at the rear of the hall, and the air coming up out of it tastes like the night I should have died in, and the man who tried to kill me twice is at the bottom of it with the thing that ends him in his coat.
"Slowly," she says again, low, against my temple.
"Slowly," I agree.
We start down.
29
CORRINE
