POV: vivenna
Summary
Vivenna presents her single bit of coin to Cads at the back-alley of the two restaurants whose garbage he rules. He turns the coin in his grime-blackened fingers, sneers that even the urchins bring him two, and waves her off. Inside the alley, the day's fortunates are eating fresh restaurant scraps. She has not eaten in days. She begs in a whisper, in the rain, in the awkward Highlands-girl voice that has never been any good at it; he pockets her coin anyway and shoos her into the wet street. From tomorrow it will be two coins or nothing.
She drifts back toward the Idrian slum. Her shawl is wrapped close — she still does not quite remember why this scrap of cloth matters, only that it does. Two streets in, she stops at a corner where the slumlords' women wait under an awning, dry and warm and laughing in revealing clothing. An urchin has already told her she could go to the slumlord with him and earn a finder's fee for her own delivery. The women look fed. She stands too long looking at them. *Blessed Austre, what am I thinking?* She forces herself onward, telling herself she would rather starve on the road back to Idris — or be retaken by Denth and tortured — than be brought indoors that way. The morality of it does not feel as fixed as it used to, now that hunger is a steady background sound in her head.
She reaches her current alley, a place she has been keeping because the urchins who share it have started letting her sleep there in exchange for whatever small coin she has come back with. Tonight the alley is empty. That is wrong. She lowers herself onto the bare mound of earth she has been calling her bed.
Shadows fall behind her. She tries to run; another shadow steps across the far mouth of the alley. The thief who once took her dress is at the back of the new pack of thugs — *sorry, princess, but the bounty got too high.* He has, he tells her, spent a fortnight tracking her; she has been very hard to find. She sinks to the cobblestones without resistance. She is glad, in a thin distant way, that it is over.
They march her out onto the main street. The street is too empty. She should have known, she thinks; she ought to have realised earlier how cleared the way was. Ahead of them, jammed point-down in the dirt of the wet road, is a black sword in a silver sheath. The street stops. A thug walks up, pulls it free, undoes the clasp.
She feels a wave of nausea that is more memory than sensation, and stumbles back. The other thugs converge on him. They reach for the hilt. He swings the sheathed blade — and with terrible speed, with force the sheath has no business carrying, he kills them. Bones snap on the cobblestones. Black smoke curls from the sliver of bare metal. As he kills, black veins like vines climb out of the skin of his arm and pulse there. He screams. When his last friend — the man who took her dress — is dead, he twists the sword around and rams it through his own chest. The sheath itself is not sharpened. It does not need to be. He dies kneeling, propped upright on the weapon, the black vines on his arm evaporating into nothing.
Vasher lowers himself from a rooftop on two twisting lengths of Awakened rope. The ropes go limp the instant his feet touch ground. He walks past Vivenna as if she is part of the street furniture, retrieves his sword, does up the clasp, and pulls the blade — sheath and all — free of the corpse. The corpse falls at last. He turns to her. She sits down dully in the street. She does not even flinch when he slings her over his shoulder and carries her away.