Del was sprawled on her back with the sword trapped under her. Instead she went for her knife.
“Uh-uh, bascha—I don’t think so.” I slammed her wrist down with my foot and put some weight on it. Enough to hold it still. The knife glinted in moonlight but a handspan away. “What—are you going to kill me because I insulted you? Because I called you a fool? Or selfish?” I laughed at her expression. “You are a fool, bascha … a silly, selfish, sandsick girl feeding off dreams of revenge.”
Fair hair slipped free of her throat. I saw fragile flesh move as she swallowed heavily. Tendons stood out tautly.
“Oh, no,” I said sharply, and bent to snatch her from the ground.
It aborted her efforts entirely, if without any grace. Having felt the results of her brothers’ teaching before, I wasn’t about to allow her the chance again. I pivoted hips aside and took the kick she meant for my groin on the shin instead, which hurt, but not as much as it might have. Then I filled my hands with cloak, tunic and harness leather and yanked her up from the ground, half-dragging, half-carrying her thirty or forty feet, where I pressed her back against one of the tumbled boulders. I restrained her the only way I knew how, which was with all of my weight. Caught between me and stone, Del had nowhere to go.
No knife. No sword. Now all she had was words.
“You’re scared,” she accused. “Swear at me if you like—call me all the names you can think of, if it makes you feel better. It doesn’t change a thing. I see it in your face, in your eyes … I feel it in your hands. You’re scared to death, Tiger. Scared because of me.”
It was not what I expected.
“Scared.” Less vehemence, but no less certainty. “I know you, Tiger—you’ve spent the last six weeks punishing yourself for what you did … I know you, Tiger—you’ve spent every day and every night of the past six weeks scared I was dead, and scared I was alive. Because if I was dead, you couldn’t live with it—with killing your Northern bascha?” Only once, she shook her head. “Oh, no, not you … not the Sandtiger, who is not quite the uncaring, unfeeling killer he likes people to think he is. So you prayed—yes you, just in case—you prayed I was alive so you wouldn’t have to hate yourself, and yet the whole time you’ve been scared I was alive. Because if I was, and we ever came face-to-face again, you’d have to explain why. You’d have to tell me why. You’d have to find a way to justify what you did.”
I took my weight from her. Turned. Took two disjointed steps away from her. And stopped.
Oh, hoolies, bascha. Why does it always hurt so?
Her voice was unrelenting. “So, Tiger … we are face-to-face. There is time now for the explaining, the telling, for the justifying—”
I cut her off curtly. “Is that why you came?”
She sounded a little breathless, if no less definite. “I told you why I came. No one will dance with me. Not in Staal-Ysta, certainly … and I think nowhere else, as well. Women are freer in the North than in the South, but few men will dance against a woman, even in practice bouts. And I need it. Badly. I have lost strength, speed, fitness … I need you to dance with me. If I am to kill Ajani, I must be strong enough to do it.”
I swung, intending to say something, but let it die as I saw how she clung to the boulder. There was no color in her face, none at all, even in her lips. She pressed one arm across her abdomen, as if to hold in her guts. She sagged against the stone.
Oh, hoolies, bascha.
“Don’t touch me,” she said sharply.
I stopped short of her and waited.
She drew in a noisy breath. “Say you will dance with me.”
I spread my hands. “And if I don’t, you won’t let me touch you—is that it? You won’t let me pick you up from the ground—which is where you’ll be in a moment—and carry you to the fire, where there’s food and amnit—”
“Say it,” she said, “and we won’t have to find out that you can’t carry me, which would hurt your pride past repairing.”
“Del, this is ridiculous—”
“Yes,” she agreed. “But we’ve both been that before.”
“If you think I’m going to step into a circle with you after what happened the last time—”
“Just say it!” she cried, and something at last broke. She crossed both arms against her ribs and hugged herself hard, standing only by dint of braced legs and sheer determination. “If I don’t go after him—if I don’t kill Ajani—if I don’t honor my oath …” She grimaced, loosened hair hanging, obscuring much of her face but not the ragged tone in her voice. “I have to, I have to … there is nothing left for me … nothing at all left for me … no parents, no brothers, no aunts and uncles and cousins … not even Kalle is mine—not even my daughter is mine—” She sucked in a painful whooping breath. “Ajani is all I have. His death is all I have. It’s all the honor that’s left.”