The Tyrant's Law(86)

“Lady!” Alston shouted, but too late. The attacker was too close for Clara to flee from, too close for anyone to intervene. Clara tasted the coppery flush of fear, but held her ground. She had never trained to fight—it wasn’t something ladies did—but Dawson had spoken to her many times on the strategies and tactics of a duel. The first rule was not to do what the enemy expected. A young man with a lead-tipped cudgel running at an unarmed woman in her middle years. He’d assume she would shy away, turn from the blow. Clara’s eyes narrowed.

The club rose in the air, ready to splatter her brain on the cobbles. Clara stepped in toward the man and brought the point of her toe up into his sex with a force she hadn’t used since she’d been a girl with rough cousins. The man’s yelp was as much surprise as pain, and he hunched forward, barreling into her. His shoulder struck her just under her ribs, and she felt the breath blow out of her. His club fell to the ground, bounced along the cobbles, then rolled. She sat down hard on the pavement, her hands to her belly, fighting the urge to vomit. The man scrambled to his knees, tried to stand, but Alston was on him.

“Are you well, my lady?”

“Fine, thank you,” Clara said, hauling herself to her feet.

The men had been subdued. One of her guards had Ossit’s face pressed in the gutter and his arm bent cruelly back. The clubman who hadn’t assaulted her lay on the walk, his hands held to his face and black with blood. Only the Kurtadam remained on his feet, his hands lifted in a surrender that managed to speak defiance.

“Well done,” Clara said. “We’ll take him to the magistrates.”

“You,” the Kurtadam said. “I remember you now. You’re the high-class bitch from Coe’s rooming house. I knew I’d heard your voice before.”

“I am,” she said. “And you made a mistake when you chose to steal from my household.”

“You made a mistake when you stepped in the street,” the Kurtadam man said and spat. “Go ahead, then. Take me to the magistrate. Hang me in a cage. It won’t be the first week I’ve spent pissing down the Division. But ask yourself what you’ll do when they pull me back up, eh? So how about instead you let my boys go and we call it truce. You made your point. I got it. The house is yours, we won’t be back that way again.”

Alston knelt beside his fallen man. The guard’s face was pale and the bright pink loops between his fingers meant he needed a cunning man quickly or a grave digger slow. Dawson would have tied them all to the wall outside the compound and whipped them until the bones showed. But that had been when he was a baron and meting out justice was his right. If he had been here now, if he had seen her with the muck of the street on her skirts and the thugs threatening her in the still-falling rain, he would have been outraged. She thought of Vincen lying in his own blood. Of Dawson, slaughtered before the full court. Outrage was yet another luxury she could not afford.

“I don’t think I can trust you,” Clara said, surprised by the coolness of her voice. The resolve in it.

“Madam, I need to get Steen to help,” Alston said. “He’s falling into shock.”

“I understand.”

“Well,” the Kurtadam said, “what’s it to be, then? March us off to the magistrate and have an enemy for life, or you go your way, take care of your boy with the open gut, and I’ll go mine.”

“Will you give me your word of honor that you will exact no revenge?” Clara asked.

“You have my word,” the Kurtadam purred.

Clara hesitated for a moment, caught between two versions of herself, and unsure which was the true one. Her inclination was to let the man go, and farther down the road have him appear in the night with his knives and laughter again. She knew in her bones that was how the story would go, and still the power of compromise was so ingrained in her soul that it was hard to turn away from. For so many years, the rules of court and etiquette said that a man was to be taken at his word, and if he should break it, the humiliation was his. Old rules for old times. Ruthlessness was called for now. And so, ruthless she would be.

“Your word,” she said, “isn’t worth shit. Alston?”

“Ma’am?”

“Will you please kill these men and throw the bodies in the Division?”

The Kurtadam’s eyes went wide as Alston sank his blade in the man’s belly. Ossit cried out in despair, but it cut off quickly. Clara watched them die, and a part of her died with them. She had seen pigs at the slaughter. She had seen bodies hanging from the gallows. The two together gave the proceedings some context, but they did not make them easy.