“Once again you ask me questions you should have asked at the start of our transaction. Still, as I said, I am not a wicked woman. I will not keep the details from you. I have lived a long and tumultuous life that has left me with many debtors to chase and scores to settle. Long have I waited for a strong, unbreakable brute such as yourself to cross my threshold begging for my services. You will be my strong right-arm, my blade in the world.”

  She talked as though she was delivering exciting news. Rakon could imagine that at any moment she would lift her skirts and dance a whirling jig about the cottage.

  “I am a satyr warrior,” he said, lifting one hand to the darkening welts crisscrossing his neck. “I am no murderer, nor assassin for hire.”

  Vixana laughed out loud again. “You have no choice, dear satyr. Either you serve me for ten years, or I will wring the life from you right here on my floor.”

  She lifted her hands towards the amulet and Rakon hurriedly moved away. He paused before speaking again, trying to fathom a way out of his predicament. The rope moved slightly against his throat, whisper-light, as though exhaling a soft breath. He shuddered.

  “Ten years only,” he finally grunted, defeated. “But I will hate you for every second of those years.”

  Rakon wanted to run from the cottage. He wanted to scream and rage—anything but stand there prostrate and useless as he blindly accepted his fate. This was not the way of his people. He was raised to be a fighter, a proud member of a powerful nation. Now he was to be obedient guard dog to a spiteful witch. He turned away, afraid he might vomit.

  “One last thing,” Vixana said. “While you are in my service, the amulet remains bound to me. It is very old and very rare. It commands far more power than that needed for mere glamours and tricks. The power of death itself resides in that trinket.”

  She stared at him, the taut lines of her alabaster face gleaming with a cold, ancient evil that twisted Rakon’s stomach and filled his mouth with sour bile.

  “You have already seen a fragment of that power for yourself,” she said. “If you attempt to remove the amulet again, or if you tell anyone about our bargain, I will not show such mercy a second time.”

  Rakon had been Vixana’s mercenary for a mere six months but his former life in Nymed already felt blurry and unreal, like a pleasant daydream or a dead-drunk fantasy. Vixana’s list of enemies and errands was exhaustive. He had slit the throat of an Armorian sea captain, crippled a young farmhand, and laid waste to an entire herd of prize pigs.

  Each new request was conveyed on small squares of thick, brown parchment that would appear propped against his water jug on a bedside table or beneath his pillow as he slept. He had once found one of the loathsome missives stuck to the back of a prostitute, slick with sleep sweat as she slumbered beside him. The sight of the parchment—covered with the witch’s increasingly familiar scrawl—never failed to make him shudder. Vixana always knew where he was residing, even when he attempted to cloister himself away amongst the brothels and drinking dens of the Pinchpaw’s Quarter—a corner of Armoria where all real business was conducted at dusk and nobody used their true names.

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  The witch never gave him an explanation for the tasks she set him. Rakon didn’t know why he was to slaughter a herd of pigs but not the farmer, or why he was to kill a single teenage farmhand and leave the rest of the workers untouched. After a while, he stopped wondering. Better to plough blindly on, to concentrate on reaching the end of his servitude and try not to think about the years still stretching out before him.

  Late at night, he drowned out the last dying gasps of those he murdered with cheap, strong wine and tired whores. At least his pockets were never empty. Vixana’s former enemies no longer had need of their coin purses but every time Rakon cut one from the belt of a body, the same rising surge of nausea would threaten to overwhelm him.

  His first task—for he could not bring himself to call them victims—had been a young changeling girl. This girl had barely lived, yet somehow she had enraged an ancient witch so thoroughly, she demanded her throat be split upon his blade. It only occurred to him afterwards that perhaps it would have brought the girl some strange peace to know why she was being killed, or on whose order. To know the man who spilled her tender blood into the street did not want to do what he did. Or perhaps Rakon was just thinking selfishly once again, yearning for a forgiveness he did not deserve.

  For all her youth, the waif had impressed him. She never once begged for her life but only stared him down with a tired, cold acceptance. She also delivered a well-aimed kick to his genitals, for which he could not blame her. When it was over, he’d nursed the dull pain that continued to throb between his legs with bottles of dark rum edged with spice. He drank until the room spun and his eyes rolled in his head, until he could no longer feel the changeling’s skin parting beneath his blade. Then he continued to drink until another square of parchment arrived a week later.

  “This is what I deserve,” Rakon told himself as he looked again around his cell. “Dying in a cold, windowless box beneath the sea is fitting punishment for a murderer.”

  He had no idea how long he’d sat hunched in the corner. He only knew his muscles were stiff, singing with pain in the damp. Eventually, he heard footsteps in the corridor outside and the door swung open. Vanth appeared, silhouetted in the doorway. She held a vicious looking scourge in one hand and a guttering candle in the other. Rakon did not flinch when he saw the whip; he’d already decided what he would do once the Salt Sword returned.

  “I will tell you all I know,” he said before she could speak. Then he looked away, unable to meet her gaze. “I am bound in servitude to a witch and she wanted you dead.”

  Vanth pulled the door closed and entered the cell. She dropped the whip to the floor.

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Rakon.”

  She nodded. “And why does a witch want me dead?”

  “That, I do not know. But I will tell you all I can. Whatever choice I make next, I do not believe I will survive the night. I would rather die knowing I did at least one decent thing before the end.”

  “Who’s going to kill you?” Vanth produced a small waterskin from a bag at her belt. She passed it to Rakon before lowering herself to sit cross-legged on the floor, seemingly unconcerned about the damp filth. The candle glowed softly before her.

  Rakon took a long, deep drink from the waterskin before replying. “Either you will torture all information from me and then kill me, or the witch I serve will learn of my betrayal. She seems to know all that I do and say, and she will kill me herself as she has often threatened to do should I ever tell anyone of our arrangement.”

  Vanth watched him for a moment, absorbing this information carefully before spreading her hands over the small heat of the candle flame and taking a breath.

  “Speak. Tell me everything about this witch.”