The Tyrant's Law (Dagger and the Coin)

return for you.”
    “Who’s hurt? What’s going on?”
    The man didn’t answer. His footsteps went away down the corridor, then to the rough stair at its end before being lost under the shrieking. Clara hesitated in the darkness. Only the faintest moonlight shouldered its way through her window, and the room hadn’t lost the stale heat of the day. The air felt close as a coffin. She put down her candlestick and walked to the door. The rude plank that assured her privacy was already in its brackets, but she put her hands to it all the same, as if touching the wood might assure her safety. The screaming paused, and masculine shouts took their place. She winced at each new sound, then strained at the silences. Footsteps pounded across the floor below her, and a man shouted once, wordlessly, but in triumph. It wasn’t a voice she knew.
    Her rage surprised her. The sane thing, the right and expected one, would be to stay where she was, cowering in the heat and gloom and hoping to be overlooked by violence. For most of her life, it was what she would have done. With both hands, she heaved the plank up, then dropped it to the floor, and then stepped back for her candlestick, making a short internal note to herself that provided she lived to see morning, she would want a weapon of some sort in her bedroom in the future. A cudgel, perhaps.
    The woman’s voice was screaming again, but there were words in it now. Vulgarities and threats. Clara made her way down the hall, her chin forward and her head high. The sharp sound of metal against metal announced swordplay, but she didn’t pause. As she marched down the stairs, the screaming resolved itself. Abatha Coe, the keeper of the boarding house. Her voice came from the kitchen. Clara pushed her way in.
    The ruddy light of the open stove showed two Firstblood men, young and thin, their ragged beards hardly enough to cover their naked throats, holding Abatha on her knees while she screamed. An older Kurtadam man, broad across the shoulders, his pelt shining red in the firelight, was loading haunches of meat into a rough canvas bag. Vincen lay on the floor, a fourth man—also a Firstblood—kneeling on his shoulder blades, pinning him in place. Vincen’s sword was in the kneeling man’s hands.
    “What,” Clara said in the stentorian voice she kept for intimidating servants, “is the meaning of this?”
    As if for punctuation, she swung the candlestick against the kneeling man’s head, just above the ear with as much power as the close quarters allowed. The pewter candlestick jarred her fingers, the kneeling man yelped and put a hand to his ear, and chaos erupted. One of the men restraining Abatha let go and turned toward Clara, drawing a cruelly curved dagger. Vincen surged forward, reaching for his sword, the kneeling man struggling to get back atop him before he could. Abatha screamed, wrenching herself around, trying to free her one trapped arm.
    The young man with the dagger slid forward, knife at the fore, and Clara threw the candlestick at his head. It bounced off his temple without any clear effect, and Clara’s righteous anger drained from her in an instant. She stepped back into the corridor, her hands held before her. Because better he cut off my fingers before I die , she thought, ridiculously. The man feinted to the right, then the left. In the dim light, she could see his teeth as he grinned.
    “Ossit! Behind you!” the Kurtadam man called, and the knifeman turned in time for Abatha Coe to come boiling out of the kitchen, her face a mask of supernatural rage. Clara reached forward and grabbed the knifeman’s wrist, pulling it toward her so that the blade might not find its home in Abatha’s belly. The man was stronger than he looked. Clara pulled at his wrist, drawing the blade closer to herself as Abatha shrieked and cursed and flailed at him.
    Someone barreled into her side, breaking her grip and pushing her into the wall. She stumbled, and the bite of the knife caught her arm, the pain bright and intimate. She grabbed at her wound with the opposite hand and felt the slickness of blood. Men were surging around her, and she braced herself for the next blow. But it never came.
    They ran past her, the Kurtadam man at the lead, his canvas bag hanging heavy against his back. The three Firstblood toughs followed him with blades drawn. Clara saw joy in their faces. Abatha, crouched on all fours in the frame of the kitchen door, called out threats and