Promises of truth-telling had its limits. Runa had to get Severine’s shirt off before she would tell her more about where she’d been.

  And not even in a fun way.

  “So much for my new wardrobe, right?” Severine joked. She was lying on her stomach. Once she took her cloak off, it had become clear that the sleeves she’d pushed up to reveal her injured wrist were almost all that remained of her tunic and shirt. “If you’re thinking Who do I need to kill right now, and it would be very sweet if you were, then I’m sorry to tell you the answer is a series of very unwelcoming rooftops.”

  Runa moved a candle closer, to get a better look at the bloody scrape that ran from Severine’s shoulder down to her hip, and was careful not to hiss in her breath. It looked painful. But Severine knew that. She was the one in pain. The best thing Runa could do was tend her wounds, and take Severine’s conversational bait.

  “Tile or straw?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “These rooftops. Should I smash them up, or burn them?”

  Severine laughed in surprise, then winced. “Ahaha. Ow. Don’t worry, that’s taken care of. Fate spun her happy spindle of knives, and made right one corner of our damaged world.”

  Runa gently swabbed Severine’s back with the cleansing ointment from Corvin’s kit, and wiped it off with a clean cloth. “Fate threw you off a rooftop?”

  “No, I managed that myself. Either I’m getting old, or rooftops are getting trickier.”

  “Fate couldn’t find you someone on the ground to hand a sword over to?”

  “It was a knife. The little one, you remember? Stubby little guy with the blackened blade?”

  Runa uncorked the small jar of healing salve. It glowed faintly in the shadows, and splintered the firelight that flickered over it. She blinked. That was real magic, not the occasional herbalism most apothecaries dealt in when they weren’t busy poisoning themselves.

  “Blackened blade?” she muttered. “The one that always looked grubby?”

  Not like Bloodburster, whose blade was blackened and pitted with decades of, to make a wild guess, bursting blood.

  “There’s no need to be so—oh. I suppose now it isn’t around anymore, I don’t need to spare its feelings. It did look grubby, didn’t it?” Severine looked as though she’d like to stretch out languidly, the way she usually did when their conversations roamed to her priesting stories. “I found its fated wielder roaming the rooftops of distant, unseasonably slippery Billswater. We stared at each other in the silver moonlight. All the stars were watching, etc etc, and the enchanted blade passed into its rightful hand, and was immediately used to pry the gilding off the roof of an ancient temple.”

  “Now there’s a fate I can see the point of,” Runa chuckled. “I know plenty of ancient temples. Bet it’d be handy for popping gemstones out of the eye sockets of ancient statues, too.”

  “Do you do that?” Severine sounded faintly scandalized, which was rich, coming from the priestess whose sacred duty included enabling roof-stealing.

  “You have to get them before they start shooting lightning at you out of ‘em,” Runa drawled. If Severine could put on the na?ve priestess act, she could put on the world-weary adventurer one.

  “So you can get to the cursed treasure behind them?”

  “If you’re lucky.” Runa dabbed some of the glittering salve on the very edge of Severine’s scrapes. “Last winter I spent a whole afternoon smacking runic gemstones out of skeletal hands before they could pop them back into their skulls, while my client fussed over writing down a detailed description of some long-lost artifact.”

  “They just wanted to look at it? Not take it? Ooh, that’s cold.”

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  Runa waved a hand. “It was one of those—you know. You move it, some old spell goes a-ha! and then you’re all in deep shit. My client—she was a wizard, so, you know, she just wanted to take notes to prove something to all the other wizards back home.”

  “Like Ninnius and Anklopher?”

  “Gods know what they were after. Whatever it was, they seemed more interested in fighting each other than finding it.” Runa shook her head. “They marked the job complete, though. So whatever it was, they mustn’t have minded not finding it.”

  “They talked about losing something when the mountains pounced on them. Ow. That’s cold! Why is it so cold?”

  “Because it’s working.”

  Severine’s back was almost completely healed. Hells. Runa shouldn’t have been so quick to reject Corvin’s offer of help that first night, after all. She would have saved herself a lot of aches and pains from her tumble down the avalanche.

  “I’d say you can put your shirt back on now, but I don’t think that’s physically possible.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’ll huddle under my cloak and shiver.”

  “Your cloak’s shredded, too.” Runa hesitated. “It was only the roof?”

  “You’re worried the roof-thief turned on me and tried to cut me to ribbons?” She shrugged, and seemed relieved when it didn’t hurt. “Not this time. All my own fault.”

  Now that Runa knew to listen for it, the hint of bitterness behind Severine’s easy words was unmistakeable. “I think you can safely blame Stubby Grubby for that one,” she said.

  “Stubby Grubby is fulfilling the fate passed down to it by the gods beyond the stars, stealing gold trimmings from their old palaces. You can’t blame something for their fate.”

  “Can’t you?” Runa rose and grabbed one of her spare shirts from the next room. She looked away as Severine shrugged into it.

  She stared into the flickering firelight, remembering the first time Severine had laid out her swords and spun a tale of her life as priestess of the blades. The night she’d arrived in Runa’s cellar.

  Her job had almost killed her then, too.

  “And the stubby knife is… happy? That fate decided it should be used to steal roofs?”

  Severine was trying to tie Runa’s shirt high enough that it didn’t drape scandalously low. Runa could have told her not to bother. It was too much shirt, and not enough ties. “Um. Yes? They only go where they’re meant to be.”

  “And Junilla uses her cleaver to chop vegetables, which for someone previously known as the Butcher Queen, must have come as a surprise to it.”

  Severine looked up from fiddling with the ties, her expression wary. “It was a surprise to me. I thought I’d left her to rule over Staranza and everything else. Exactly nowhere in my expectations was the thought that she’d end up ruling a tiny village in the corner of nowhere, instead.”

  “Junilla doesn’t rule the village.”

  “Yes, and have you noticed how very clearly she tells everyone that, before making sure things are running perfectly to her preferences?” Severine gave up on the laces. “You’re thinking about Bloodburster.”

  “Mm.”

  “You’re thinking, how come they got swords like that, and you got Bloodburster?”

  “The thought crossed my mind.”

  Severine slithered out of the chair and took Runa’s hands in hers. “It’s not going to happen. We’ll find another way. If I have to find a home for every enchanted knife, dagger and fingernail-picker in the world before Bloodburster, I’ll do it. We know it works, now. If I’m helping another piece of the cutlery drawer to its fate, the others shush for a bit, and that includes Bloodburster.”

  “So we stick with the plan. You run off to do your duty wherever else the fates carry you,” Runa said slowly. “And then you come back.”

  “And then I come back.”

  Runa had kept her voice as steady as possible; when Severine echoed her, she felt all her uncertainty and hope reflected back at her.

  Still. She pressed on, feeling as though she was taking an axe to the branch she was sitting on. “Because in between other missions, Bloodburster will keep drawing you back here, and I’m a better bet than the Blood Lord.”

  “Because I want to come back to you!”

  Runa watched Severine hear her own words in her ears. How thin they were in the firelit room. How the shadows sucked them away, making them sound like an excuse. Another story, poorly told.

  “I did,” she protested. She licked her lips, arming herself with irony against the shadows’ scepticism. “You know, because since I hadn’t told you a single true thing the whole time I was here, you actually thought I was nice…”

  “I never thought you were nice.”

  Severine blinked. She didn’t jerk back like she’d been slapped, but it was a near thing.

  Shit.

  Runa leaned forwards. She made sure not to crowd Severine, huddled on the big chair, but made sure it was clear she wanted to be close.

  “I thought you were wonderful. I thought you were funny, and hot, and surprisingly competent despite your best attempts to look otherwise, but I never thought you were nice. I figured you were lying about something. I just didn’t figure out how many things until you left.”

  “Oh. Oh.” Severine’s mouth moved, and what came out was: “But I am nice!”

  “Doubtable.”

  “You—”

  “From all the stories you’ve told of what the sword priesthood means, if you were nice, you would have folded up like wet cardboard years ago.”

  Severine let out a long, slow breath. “Oh. That’s… I’ve never thought of it like that before.”

  “I like you better as you are,” Runa told her.

  “Really? The not-nice me? The one who lied to you, and ran off in the middle of the night?”

  “Yes.” Runa took a deep breath. “And… there’s this.”

  just some sweet lost adventurer, right?