Page 80 of The Book That Held Her Heart

“No!” Arpix’s shout joined hundreds of others protesting the unfairness as the soldier skeer loomed over Clovis’s prone form. It raised its blade-arm like a chef preparing to chop vegetables for the pot, and the cries from the stands turned to screams.

Clovis rose an instant before the soldier could take its swing, pushing her sword ahead of her, driving the length of it up through the skeer’s head. When she stood, she brought the crowd’s roar up with her, victory and relief mixing in the many-throated cry.

She hadn’t finished, though. Not trusting in a sword through the head to finish her opponent, she lunged and twisted, using the entire weight of her body to enlarge the wound then bring the blade out through the skeer’s face, trailing white ichor.

The soldier collapsed behind her as she walked away.

Always kick a man when he’s down, I say. It’s the best chance you’ll get.

The Liar’s Key, by Mark Lawrence

Chapter 35

Evar

Evar pulled free of Starval’s blade, turning to confront his brother as the blood ran from the wound in his lower back. The physical pain was bad, but less so than Evar might have guessed—less so than being shot. It was the emotional pain that rocked him on his heels.

“You stabbed me! You actually stabbed me!”

Starval stood there, his blade raised between them.

“That’s not even how you do it.” Evar couldn’t believe he was complaining about how he’d been stabbed. Shock had hold of his tongue. But he was right. It wasn’t how Starval had taught him, and the fact he was still standing showed it to be an inefficient method. Was Starval being cruel? That wasn’t the assassin’s way.

“No,” Starval agreed woodenly.

“Did he pay you to hurt me first?” Evar would never have imagined Mayland putting a contract on his life, much less anything less than a clean, painless one.

“I have to.” Starval continued to stare at his knife and the blood black upon it. “This truth is all I am.”

Evar took a step back, one hand pressed to his wound, the other raised towards his brother. The closed square offered no retreat, its walls rising on all sides, the scarce windows all shuttered, as if the buildings themselves were looking away. Kerrol would know what to say to Starval. Evar couldunderstand the knot his brother had tied himself in, or that Mayland had tied, but couldn’t see how to undo it.

Starval’s escape from a life sentence amid the book towers of their chamber had been to retreat from it. To distance himself from everything. To make a game of it. To say it didn’t matter, that nothing mattered, and to repeat that mantra a million times until the boy that had emerged from the Mechanism lay buried beneath that rejection. He stood beyond emotion now, beyond appeal, armoured in so many layers of denial that nothing could reach him.

Or that had been the plan. Because if everything about sunny Starval had been a lie, Evar would be sprawled in the mud, his heart pierced by his brother’s first blow. But the next blow, the final thrust of the dagger, was coming. Evar could sense it. Starval had built his life upon a particular contract with reality. He had been paid. He allowed himself no choices.

“This—” Evar bit back on the pain. “This is like Jaspeth and Irad. Brothers at war. Their grandfather invented fratricide. That’s the story. And—”

“I have to do this.” Starval advanced.

Evar saw it. The stack of crimes Mayland had piled upon Starval, using him as the weapon he’d shaped himself into. If Starval had refused this commission, the poisoning of a whole city would become a choice. If one thing mattered—everything did. In one moment, Evar saw the only way to undo the knot, and how it would be impossible to do so. He had to beat Starval. And despite the chance his brother had given him, he stood unarmed and wounded before the most skilled of assassins.

“Ready?” Starval jabbed and Evar skipped back despite his injury. The look in Starval’s eyes promised there would be no more chances.

In a knife fight perhaps even Clovis would not have been Starval’s equal. Evar had been trained by the master, but even on his best day he would stand no chance in a fair contest. And this wasn’t fair. He had no knife.

There, in the dank shadow of the nameless square, inspiration struck.

Evar whipped his arm across the space between them, even though his brother was too far away to punch. Starval, ever cautious, lifted his dagger to block the non-existent blow, and tensed, ready for any projectile that might leave Evar’s hand.

Evar had no throwing stars, no blade, no handful of sand to blind an unwary opponent. He had nothing in his hand save his blood, and even that was not his own. Mayland had, under the scrutiny of Kerrol and Clovis, healed Evar. The blood of the library ran in Evar’s veins now. And Starval had set it free.

Evar didn’t form the weapon until the swing of his arm had passed Starval’s blocking manoeuvre. He made a black rod, as thick as the volume of blood allowed. Even Starval’s breathtaking reflexes couldn’t save him entirely. The cane struck him around the temple. He staggered back.

“Clever.” Allowing Evar no time to think, Starval spun in, sweeping a leg, knife moving.

Evar jumped the leg sweep and, in mid-air, deflected the lunge of Starval’s blade on a black buckler of his own blood. He tried to kick his brother in the chest, but the knife wound in his back robbed the attack of strength. He landed badly and Starval was on him. The blow to the head must have dazed and slowed the assassin: his knife struck sparks from the flagstones. Evar wrapped the blade in a thickness of black blood, taking away its sharpness. In the same moment he kneed Starval in the stomach, throwing him clear. Both of them rolled to their feet at the same time.

“Very clever.” Starval spat blood and turned his now-useless blade this way then that. He tossed it aside and drew a new knife from a hidden scabbard on his chest, a thinner, sharper one.

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