Aspen took her sword from Charm, buckled on the belt, and mouthed thank you before she gave her full focus to Pike. As if Aspen was now the actor, the room shifted again, this time to form a large circle, creating an arena for Aspen and Pike to fight in.

  It was time to see who Integrity had trained best.

  Pike rushed her, jumping on the offensive. Aspen met his first swing with her own blade, and the sound of steel clanging against steel echoed through the room. This wasn’t the first time Aspen had fought Pike, but there were higher stakes now than there had ever been before. He used to fight her as if he had something to prove, and he didn’t pull any of his strength back. If their sword tips hadn’t been blunted, he could have done serious damage to her.

  Today, he fought her intending to kill her.

  She matched his intensity. Integrity always told her the reason he gave the Scale a mission and was so careful in selecting members for the group was because motivation could be what tipped a fight one way or another. If two people were matched in strength, it was their will that would determine a winner.

  Since Pike fought for a permanent end to the rivalry they had had for years, Aspen had to as well. She slid her blade free and then drove the tip of her sword at Pike. He wasn’t expecting the attack and had to jump back to avoid being hit. He was off-balance now, and Aspen pressed her advantage.

  She drove him back further. He no doubt expected her to fall into a defensive position, the way she’d favored during their training. This wasn’t a fight of endurance. And this wasn’t training. She had been locked in a jail cell, deprived of food and a good sleep. She’d already had two fights today. If she didn’t end this quickly, she wouldn’t like the way it ended.

  Pike twisted and suddenly he was in her space. Their swords were locked together, the sharp edges merely inches from both their faces. They were close enough to feel each other’s breath. Pike’s lips curled in a cruel smile, and Aspen was too busy guessing at his thoughts to realize what his body was doing.

  He knee slammed into her gut, and it was her turn to stumble back. She kept her balance, but she drew short breaths as she recovered. She brought her sword up in time to block Pike’s next thrust, but it was a weak guard.

  It took too much time and too much energy for her to fully recover. By the time she was prepared to launch her own offensive, Pike was warmed up and comfortable. She was forced back on defense because he didn’t give her an opening to turn the flow of the fight.

  Sweat dripped down her back and stung at her eyes. Her arms were tired and if she stood still for too long, her legs shook. She needed to end this. She saw a sliver of an opening, and she drove her sword forward. At the last second, Pike spun away from the attack. He came back at her with speed, and she fumbled through a defense.

  He had her on the back foot, and he knew it. But he was tiring too, because he didn’t waste his breath mocking her. He simply drove forward, a relentless assault. He brought the flat of his blade down on her hand, and Aspen dropped her sword as pain rang through her bones.

  Before she could grab her weapon, Pike kicked it aside. His smile was frightening now, and his eyes were lit up with imminent victory. He settled into a picture-perfect stance, emphasizing the sword in his hand and the lack of one in Aspen’s.

  “What would Integrity say if you dropped your weapon?” Pike asked.

  He wouldn’t have said anything. He would have looked at Aspen’s empty hand and then looked at her sword, and she would know to pick it up and then go through her exercises until her arms were too tired to lift her weapon.

  Aspen eyed the tip of Pike’s blade and the coil of his leg muscles. “Are you going to talk or attack?” Aspen asked. Her words weren’t as steady as she would have liked. She was winded and now that she’d stopped moving, she could feel the heat on her face.

  Pike drove forward, and Aspen side-stepped. She grabbed his wrist and yanked. She pulled him off-balance and right onto the knife she’d pulled from its sheath on her belt. Pike gasped as the blade punctured his stomach. With a grunt, Aspen ripped the blade up.

  “Integrity taught me never to rely on one weapon,” Aspen said. Her voice was low, meant only for Pike. She had been Integrity’s favorite, his heir, and Pike killed him because he was selfish.

  She yanked her knife out and watched as Pike dropped his sword to clutch at the wound. Aspen hadn’t split him in half the way she wanted to, but it was a mortal wound. His hands were big enough to staunch the flow of blood, and gut wounds were tricky.

  They were slow, too.

  Aspen watched the spasms of pain on Pike’s face. She thought she’d feel victorious or satisfied watching him die. She thought seeing him hurt for what he’d done would help fill the emptiness that had been in her life since Integrity died and she ran from the Scale.

  It didn’t make her feel good or whole or like she was seeing justice done. She stepped up to Pike. He didn’t put up any fight as she grabbed a handful of his hair and pulled his head back. She drew her knife across his throat. It was a quicker death this way. When his legs buckled, she let him go and he fell to the ground.

  Aspen, now splattered with Pike’s blood, looked around the room. If anyone challenged her, she would lose. On the far side of the room, Strength shifted her weight, preparing for another fight. But Pike’s people, the ones who had remained loyal to him, they bent down to set their weapons on the ground.

  Pike had always believed power trumped everything, and Aspen had proved herself by defeating him. She didn’t want his Scale. She could have led Integrity’s, maybe, but she didn’t want Pike’s. And she didn’t want the loyalty of his mercenaries. She wanted them gone.

  She searched the crowd for what she really wanted. When her gaze landed on Charm, she couldn’t help but smile. Because Charm was standing there, whole and healthy. The threat against Aspen was gone. It wouldn’t put Charm in danger if they traveled together now. They could let their feelings for each other grow into a life together.

  So Aspen wasn’t sure what to do when Charm said into the stunned silence of the room, “Take Integrity’s seal. We were interrupted earlier. It’s time to open that vault and finish this.”

  Charm knew what was in the vault. She was the only one who knew. She must want Aspen to see it.

  “I’m not Pike,” Aspen said. A weak, unnecessary start to addressing the crowd, but she had to say something. “I won’t run the Scale the way he did. I don’t want to run it at all. If you were fighting for loyalty to Pike, you’re free to go. Don’t cause trouble for me and I won’t cause trouble for you.”

  Some of the fighters in the room picked up their weapons and shuffled out, battered and defeated. One was angry enough to spit on the floor. Aspen was too practical to think she’d truly seen the last of them, but she’d killed their leader and run them out of their home, so she’d have a little time before they’d be organized enough to try anything. Without Pike and the Scale behind them, they were nothing to fear.

  She’d expected that. What surprised her was the number of people who stayed.

  “What if we weren’t loyal to Pike?” Tenacity stepped forward. He’d switched sides in the battle. Behind him, Aspen recognized others who’d been fighting against Pike.

  Before Aspen could shrug and tell them to go make new lives, Charm said, “Aspen. The vault.”

  Aspen bent down to work Integrity’s ring off Pike’s rapidly cooling fingers. She retraced the now familiar path to the dungeon and the forbidding vault door, feeling foolish with the ring heavy in her hand. Charm might like an audience, but Aspen would prefer privacy while she failed at opening that thrice-rotted magic lock. It had caused her enough headaches already.

  Integrity had died—had been murdered suddenly. He probably hadn’t had time to choose a successor. Aspen bet the spell wouldn’t open for anyone, regardless of what ring they were wearing.

  She slipped the ring onto her finger. In a legend or a fairy tale, it would have fit perfectly. It was loose.

  Aspen knew from the murmurs and footsteps behind her that a crowd had followed her down the stairs, but she could only stare at the vault door. She missed Integrity fiercely. She’d rather have him than whatever he’d thought was worth keeping in this silly vault.

  She lifted her hand to grasp the door handle. She pulled.

  It opened.

  The hinges should have creaked with disuse, but Aspen supposed one of the benefits of an enchanted door was perfectly oiled silence. She left the vault hanging open and stepped inside.

  A wooden chest sat on the floor. Years’ worth of dust lay over the top, recently disturbed by Charm’s fingerprints around the latch. Unlike the vault door, the chest wasn’t locked. Inside, the first thing Aspen found was a sealed envelope with her name on it in Integrity’s handwriting.

  Charm must have seen this. She’d left it sealed, though.

  Aspen broke it open.

  Aspen, Integrity had written.

  You’ll think this business with the vault and naming an heir is silly, no doubt.

  Well, he wasn’t wrong.

  But I have come to worry about the future of what I’ve created, and to wonder whether I’ll live to see that future. Whatever small legacy I’ve managed to create, I want to safeguard a part of it in this vault. These are my papers, records of how I ran the Hanging Scale and notes on what I wish I’d done differently—and a few letters, things I never managed to say to you, like this one.

  I want you to have it. The papers, the house, the Scale, everything. I don’t want to burden you, though. You can toss it all aside if you like.

  I know you’d only do that if you had found some other, better way to continue this work.

  I trust you, Aspen.

  Yours,

  Integrity

  Aspen blinked back tears. Branch, leaf, and root, she was glad nobody had read this letter aloud in public.

  She’d never grieved him, not really. It had been too hard in the chaotic aftermath, and then Pike had run her out of Harstead and she’d had to focus on her own survival. But Integrity, for all he’d become a symbol, had been a person, too. A person she missed.

  A person who’d left her his legacy.

  If only she’d known that years ago. She could have stopped Pike from tainting the name of the Scale.

  Was it too late now?

  When she remembered the crowd of people waiting outside the vault, her heart leapt into her throat. She wished there was a paper in Integrity’s vault that would tell her what to say to them.

  I trust you, Aspen.

  She straightened her spine and strode out of the vault.

  “I opened the door,” she said simply. “You all saw it. Integrity bequeathed everything he had—his papers, his house, his mission to tip the scales of the world in favor of justice—to me.”

  “You said you didn’t want to run the Scale,” Tenacity said.

  “I don’t,” Aspen said. “I don’t want to run Pike’s version of the Hanging Scale, and I don’t think so highly of myself that I could run Integrity’s. But there’s always work to be done, and I plan to do it. Maybe not under that name, or in this house, or with the tools we’re accustomed to using, but it’ll be the same work.”

  “You’ll let us know if you need a hand?” Charm asked.

  Aspen smiled. “I will.”

  8

  Charm tsked as she cleaned one of Aspen’s many, many cuts. “Aren’t you supposed to be good at fighting? How do you even still have blood in your body?”

  “I am good at fighting. I won.”

  “Next time can you win without getting quite so many wounds? This is taking forever.”

  Aspen laughed. “With such tender ministrations, you could have been a healer instead of an actor.”

  “Will you give me a standing ovation when I finish?” Charm wrapped a length of linen bandage around Aspen’s forearm. The cuts must not be as bad as they looked if Aspen was laughing and joking—or Aspen was so accustomed to pain that she’d stopped paying it much attention, an alarming but very real possibility. Her whole torso was purpled with bruises. She still had a band of cloth around her breasts, and she was wearing her trousers, and Charm had no doubt those were hiding more wounds. Her gut twisted. It had been a brutal, draining day.

  “I think you’re supposed to give me a standing ovation,” Aspen said.

  “I do my best work on my knees.” Charm bit her lip and felt a smile lift the corners of her eyes. She waited for Aspen to laugh again, and she wasn’t disappointed when it came, sharp and dry like the rustle of fallen leaves, but still warm.

  Aspen leaned forward to kiss her on the cheek—affectionate, but not burning with lust. If anybody had asked Charm whether she wanted to be kissed like that a few months ago, she would have scoffed. But tonight, ensconced in her little wagon in the glow of a single lamp, with Aspen in her bed, it was exactly how she wanted to be kissed. An unhurried, comfortable kiss. A kiss that trusted they had all the time they needed for more. A kiss from someone who knew her, from someone who wanted all of her, someone who wanted not merely tonight, but tomorrow and all the days to come.

  Charm swallowed, unexpectedly overwhelmed. “I love you. I hope you know that.”

  “I do,” Aspen said. “But you could tell me again from time to time, just in case I forget. I love you, too. I plan to tell you every morning and every evening.”

  Charm’s heart thrilled at this vision of the future. She grinned and nudged Aspen in one of the few unbruised places on her upper arm. “Do you think me so forgetful, then?”

  “Never,” Aspen said. “I just want to say it as much as possible.”

  Charm threw her arms around Aspen and kissed her on the mouth. Aspen grabbed her back just as fiercely, sinking her fingers into the thickness of Charm’s hair. It did not feel like the grip of a woman who should be boneless with exhaustion. With strong, firm, sure movements, Aspen lay her down in the bed and covered her with her body, the weight of her like a shield against the world.

  With her forehead pressed to Aspen’s, Charm confessed, “I really didn’t want you to die in there.”

  “I lived to please you,” Aspen said, and then did exactly that.

  It was a busy few days. It was an even busier few nights, not that Aspen would mention that to anyone, although the Harstead Players made a lot of jokes about all the time she and Charm had spent in the wagon, where Charm did indeed do excellent work on her knees and in a variety of other positions, all of which required further study. A devoted lifetime of study.

  Unfortunately, the discovery that Aspen was Integrity’s heir and the dismantling of the Hanging Scale required her attention, so she’d reluctantly left Charm’s bed every morning to oversee the clearing of the wreckage at the house, to smooth things over with irritated city officials, and to read through the papers Integrity had left her.

  Strength and her people had been an immeasurable help during this process, as had, to Aspen’s surprise, a fair contingent of people who’d been working for Pike and switched sides in the final fight. She didn’t fully trust them yet, but they’d come every day to do the heavy, dirty work of clearing out the house, and they seemed to want her to direct them.

  “You should talk to them,” Strength said after one long day of sorting through the house. The two of them had come to a tavern alone. “They’re following you around like ducklings. They want to be useful. Think up some things for them to do.”

  “They’re helping clean up,” Aspen said.

  Strength rolled her eyes and took a long gulp of her beer. “You know that’s not what I meant.”

  “You think I should do what you do in Ainbridge,” Aspen said. “Run some kind of underground organization that smuggles food and medicine to people who need it.”

  “Among other things.”

  “It’s a lot like the Scale,” Aspen said.

  “It’s a lot like what Integrity wanted to do,” Strength corrected. “Think about it. Joy and I and some of the others will be heading home soon.”

  “To Ainbridge?” Aspen tried not to express shock that anybody could think of dour, dirty Ainbridge as home.

  “You don’t need me here,” Strength said. “And there are people there who do.”

  Aspen nodded, uncertain of what to say. She’d only just found Strength again and now Strength was leaving already.

  “Don’t look so down,” Strength said, reaching across the table to slap her on the shoulder. Aspen winced. “We get mail in Ainbridge. Sometimes. Or we can do a shard-pair. They’re expensive, but I’m good for it. I’m getting one for Mercy and Soar to share—they want to stay with you.”

  “They do?”

  “Aspen, after that fight, they idolize you. You’ll never know a moment’s peace again.” Strength laughed and then said, more seriously, “Also, it’s a little easier here in Harstead, you know. They won’t have to hide so much of themselves.”

  “That’s true,” Aspen said. “I’d be honored to have them. Of course, I’m just living with the troupe.”

  “They love that, too,” Strength said. “And what is happening there, exactly? Will you be traveling with the Traveling Harstead Players? Going to take up acting?”

  “Branch, leaf, and root, no,” Aspen said. “I’m not sure, exactly. But they don’t seem to mind having me around. I’ll try to make myself useful.”

  “That’s the best we can do,” Strength agreed. She set her empty flagon down and stood. “Well, I’m off to pack up with Joy. Stay in touch this time, for fuck’s sake. And write to Ayzeh. God of Sword and Shield knows he’s bored out of his skull down there in the desert.”

  “I don’t think he is, actually,” Aspen said mildly, but Strength merely embraced her, patted her hard on the back, and walked out of the tavern. Still, whether or not Ayzeh was bored, it was a good idea to keep in touch with him, and Strength, and Tescui, all the connections she’d let fall apart in the past few years.

  She’d thought herself friendless, but maybe it had never been true. She hadn’t had Integrity or the Scale, but she’d always had people to call on for help, people who could have offered her a home.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9