The Tyrant's Law (Dagger and the Coin)

Southling girl who always ate by herself. Two Firstblood workmen who’d just come to Camnipol from the north and taken a room together. They haunted the shadows, drawn to the blood like flies. Abatha’s cold gaze kept them at bay, and Clara ignored them. The cut on her own arm had begun to hurt again, but she paid it little attention.
    Without warning, Vincen howled. Light poured from his mouth and nose, from the cuts in his skin. His back arched until only his toes and the top of his head were touching the table. Clara cried out in alarm, but as quickly as it had come, it was over. The cunning man sat heavily on the bench. The terrible wound in Vincen’s side was still there, but instead of blood, a thin, milky fluid ran from it. The kitchen filled with the smell of onions.
    “He will live,” the cunning man said. “He will be weak for a time, but this is not the wound that kills him.”
    “Thank you,” Clara said. Her vision went wet and blurry. “Thank you so much.”
    “Now. Will you let me see to that arm?”
    Clara looked down. Fresh blood was still sheeting down to her wrist. When she moved, the living muscle shifted and twitched. She felt dizzy.
    “If you would,” she said. “That would be very kind.”
    The first light of dawn pressed at the windows as Abatha counted coins into the cunning man’s hand. The boarders who hadn’t made their way out already began to appear, and Abatha enlisted three of the strongest to carry Vincen to his room while she put together something edible from the ruins of her kitchen. Clara went with Vincen, and when the others left, she remained with him, watching him sleep. The reassuring rise and fall of his breast. The calm in his face. Her own skin itched where the cunning man’s words and herbs had knit it closed, and she scratched at it idly.
    He was so young, and yet older than her youngest son. Older than she had been when she’d married Dawson and become the Baroness of Osterling Fells. There were scars on his body, testaments to the life of a huntsman. And new ones now. She remembered the half-kiss she’d given him, the roughness of his stubble against her lips. The softness of his mouth. She let herself weep quietly without any particular sense of grief. Exhaustion and the aftermath of violence were surely enough to justify a few tears.
    She heard Abatha’s steps long before the woman appeared. She’d put on clothes and carried a carved wooden bowl of wheat mash that she held out to Clara. It tasted sweet and rich and comforting.
    “How is he?” Abatha asked, nodding to her cousin unconscious on his bed.
    “Well, I believe,” Clara said. “I don’t know.”
    Abatha nodded and looked down at her feet. Her lips moved, practicing some words or thoughts. When she looked up again, her expression was hard.
    “This is your fault, you know.”
    Clara wouldn’t have been more surprised if the woman had spat out a snake.
    “Excuse me?” she said. “If I’d stayed in my room, you would both have—”
    “I told him we had to leave,” Abatha said. “I told him that food was coming short, and people were going to get desperate. Get mean. Get out of the city, I told him. Close up the house and good riddance to it. There’ll be more than enough work needs doing on the farm. And he’d have gone too, if it weren’t for you and your letters, whatever they are.”
    Clara’s lips pressed thin. The sudden mixture of guilt for keeping Vincen in harm’s way, annoyance that he had spoken to Abatha about her work, and outrage that she should be asked to carry the responsibility for the actions of thugs she didn’t even know confused her into silence.
    Abatha waited for a moment, then shrugged.
    “He’s a man grown, and he makes his choices,” she said. “I do too. He’s family, and I’ll stand by him as long as he needs me. But the day he dies, you’re sleeping on the street, m’lady, because I am done with this shithole of a city.”
    At the end, the woman’s voice wavered. Of course it did. The woman had been attacked in her own home by men with knives. She’d been held helpless while her food was stolen. She’d seen her own family nearly killed before her. This anguish grew from seeds that Geder Palliako had planted. This was what Clara had chosen, in her way, to stand against. It was uncharitable to forget that, and so she wouldn’t.
    “I understand,” she said.
    “I don’t know what the hell you think you’re doing here