Bad Faith Read online

  And she was alive.

  Oh gods. Oh gods. Oh gods. Afrit was alive.

  Afrit had died to save Quirk’s life, and with that act had unlocked some hidden chamber of Quirk’s heart, a piece of her soul she had assumed was simply not there. And yet the chamber had remained empty, because its occupant was no longer here, was down in the Hallows, lost forever.

  And so Quirk had filled that chamber with hate and rage and war.

  But now she had cast that all out. Because the chamber’s occupant was—impossibly—returned to her.

  She was still in free fall. She was still on the course of that previous life. She could not get her footing, could not even think what she would do if she could.

  “Quirk!” Afrit called to her, called her back to the here and now. “Thank the gods, you’re okay.”

  “To be honest,” said a voice at Quirk’s shoulder, “I don’t think any of us had anything to do with it.”

  It was Cois, who had gotten a crossbow from somewhere only zhe knew and was busy reloading it. Quirk was surprised Balur had left hir alone in a fight. The pair seemed inseparable these days.

  Still, she couldn’t focus on that. Afrit was still perched on her fallen tree trunk, and Quirk could see a group of three enemy soldiers—surprisingly unscathed—approaching her. And they seemed to know what to do with the swords they were holding.

  Quirk sprinted to Afrit’s side, pulled on the fire in her heart, set it loose, and sent it spinning toward the three soldiers. Two went down, one dived free. Then a crossbow bolt punched through the steel of his helmet, and he stopped moving.

  Quirk glanced over at Cois, who was bent over the crossbow’s loading mechanism. Zhe glanced up and flashed Quirk a smile.

  Afrit relinquished her two-handed grip on her sword long enough to push sweaty strands of hair out of her face. “You shouldn’t be here with me,” she said. She seemed to be trying to avoid clenching her teeth, and her knuckles on the sword were white. She spoke between small pants of breath. “You should be out on the front. They need you there.”

  “I’m not going anywhere you’re not,” Quirk told her.

  “Then I’m going to the front,” Afrit said.

  “No!” Quirk called, but she was too slow. Afrit was leaping off the tree trunk with an inelegant downward slash of the sword that one of the Barphists dodged easily. Quirk roasted the man with a blast of flame to the face before he could skewer Afrit through her neck.

  “No!” she said again, more forcefully this time, running and catching up with Afrit, grabbing her by the shoulder and pulling her back so that another Barphist’s sword swipe went wide of its mark. She turned the man into a living pyre who went reeling back into his compatriots.

  “I love you,” she said to Afrit, “but you are not good at this. You have to stay back. You have to be safe.”

  “And you,” Afrit spat, seeming oblivious to the fact that Quirk had just saved her life twice, “need to be at the front. Every time you save me, you let five others die, and I will not have that on my conscience.”

  And what could Quirk say to that? That she would let a hundred die if it meant Afrit lived? A thousand? It was true, but how could she say it? And how could she fight for this cause if it was true?

  But now was not the time to figure out an answer. Their argument was abruptly a moot one: The front of the fight had come to them. A desperate push by fifty or so enemy soldiers, clustered in a tight knot of blades, barreling forward, tearing through the lighter arms of her and Will’s troops.

  Dragons circled overhead, but the two forces were tangled together so tightly now that any more bombardments would kill as many of the dragons’ allies as of their opponents. Not that Quirk was completely sure that the dragons cared, but at least they held their fire for now.

  Quirk held out an arm, used it to force Afrit away from the oncoming slaughter.

  “You should—” Afrit started again, but Quirk shook her head violently. She wasn’t going to let loose a burst of her own flame and give away Afrit’s position. She wasn’t sure she could take down all fifty attackers before Afrit was seriously injured.

  Then it was right in front of them: the price Will was still willing to pay for revenge. The price, it turned out, Quirk was willing to pay for Afrit’s safety. The unprotected people of Avarra being hacked down as they fought for freedom from oppressors.

  Blood was everywhere. Gashes opened up in flesh. Great ragged wounds. People screaming, collapsing. The smell of it almost overwhelming.

  Quirk forced Afrit away from it, shoving bodily.

  And then suddenly, something changed; there was a violent shift of momentum in the fighting. With her back to it, Quirk wasn’t sure what it was at first, but then she glanced back and made it out. Lette. Lette tearing and stabbing, pirouetting in a ballet of violence through the men and women, flinging knives, dancing around blades. It was a beautiful sort of suicide. A deranged attack that seemed to work only because of the sheer shock it caused.

  “She’s going to get herself killed.” Afrit was still breathless. “We should help her.”

  But they didn’t. They both stood, and they watched as somehow, impossibly, Lette reversed the current of this fight. The knot of attacking soldiers broke apart, spilled away from her. Their own forces fell on the stragglers without mercy.

  And then it was over. All of it. They had emerged victorious once more. Everyone was cheering. Lette stood over the fallen bodies of her foes, two bloody swords raised, their blades crossed in a victorious symbol of defiance. People gathered around her, cheering, lifting her onto their shoulders.

  Lette, who had risked her life and saved so many.

  Afrit shook her head. “That should be you.”

  Quirk looked at Afrit. Because it certainly wasn’t jealousy she felt. And it wasn’t guilt either. She was separate from this now. She had become peripheral to the fight that had consumed six months of her life.

  “I don’t want it to be me,” she said.

  Afrit’s expression wasn’t exactly accusatory, and it wasn’t exactly sad. Frustrated perhaps. “Maybe not. But they need it to be you.”

  “They don’t—” Quirk started.

  “Don’t lie to me.” The snap of Afrit’s words caught Quirk off guard. “Lie to yourself perhaps, but not to me.”

  “I was protecting you.” Defensive wasn’t the tone Quirk wanted to hit, but she found herself unexpectedly backed into that corner.

  “I don’t need your protection.”

  That was almost a laughable thing to say, but Quirk was self-aware enough to know laughter would be very much the wrong move.

  “If I hadn’t—” she started again.

  “Then I would have died,” Afrit finished for her. “But I would have died for a cause. For something that matters. I am here to fight, Quirk. I am here because this fight matters to me, and to this world. This fight is for all Avarra. Neither of us is bigger than that.”

  “You are to me.” It was all Quirk had. It was everything in her heart.

  And finally Afrit’s anger broke, and she said, “Oh, Quirk,” and she almost took Quirk in a hug, but remembered just in time and just held both her hands. “I love you,” she said. “I do. And I love that you love me. But …” She shook her head. “How many people died today because we love each other?”

  And the answer was I don’t care, but Quirk couldn’t say that. She knew she couldn’t. So she nodded, and said, “You’re right,” and tried to smile as she lied to the woman she loved.

  31

  The Things We Do for Love

  By the time Balur found her, Lette was very drunk indeed. For his part, Balur felt worryingly sober. It was an odd, deeply uncomfortable role reversal.

  He stood over Lette as she sat with a group of hard-looking men and women. When she looked up at him she was slightly cross-eyed. There was an open cask of ale to her side and a pair of dice in her hand.

  “What is it you are doing?” he asked her,
even though it was startlingly obvious.

  “Damaging my decision-making process until I lose a substantial amount of …” She looked at the dice in her hand, then the others sitting with her. “What are we betting again?”

  “The right to stab Barph in his hairy balls,” said another of the women.

  “Until I lose a substantial amount of privilege to stab Barph in his hairy balls,” Lette said to Balur. “Apparently.” She blinked. “I could have sworn it was—”

  “Can we be having a word?” Balur cut in.

  “It’s my throw.” She sounded petulant.

  “Look,” Balur said. “I am going to be the one who is stabbing Barph in his hairy balls, so this whole game is being moot. Be coming with me. We are needing to talk.”

  Lette sighed, then tossed the dice carelessly into the air. “Doesn’t count,” shouted one of Lette’s fellow players, while she spent several seconds figuring out how to uncross her legs. Once she was done, Balur led her away to a relatively quiet spot where he could embarrass himself undisturbed.

  “We are being tribe, right?” he began. Lette nodded with a degree of emphasis that could only be achieved after a certain amount of alcohol had removed a certain degree of gross motor control. With that settled, Balur went on. “And what is being my role in that tribe?” he asked.

  “To make really terrible decisions about battle strategy,” said Lette.

  Balur nodded as sagely as his outlook on life would permit him to. “Yes,” he said, which he thought caught Lette rather flat-footed. He generally tried to avoid this level of self-awareness and honesty. It tended to damage his bubbly optimism.

  “So,” he went on, “I am therefore wondering,” and now he came to the crux of it, “what the fuck was that?”

  Lette stared at him with at least one of her eyes. “Was what?” she asked.

  Balur sighed. She was going to make this difficult. “Let me be giving you a hypothetical,” he said.

  Lette rolled her eyes, and most of her head went with them. “Just because Cois finally taught you what a hypothetical is doesn’t mean you have to use them in every conversation.”

  “Say there is being a group of fifty soldiers attacking us,” Balur plowed on without stopping. “Which one of us is wading arse deep into combat with them?”

  Lette shot a finger at him. “That isn’t a hypothetical, you jackass. That’s you using a very specific example to make a pointed criticism.”

  Which was exactly how Cois had taught him to use hypotheticals, so he said, “Yes.”

  “Look,” said Lette, and waved her hand at nothing in particular. “They’re dead. I’m fine. It’s all good. You are being a ninny.”

  Again, Balur couldn’t directly refute her claims. “Yes,” he said. “I am. Which I am hoping is emphasizing how stupid what you did was being. I am not being the ninny in this tribe. You are not being the one who wanders into improbable fights. We are having what some people are calling a dynamic. You are messing with that balance. I am here doing the speech you should be giving me. Neither of us is being comfortable. Both of us are wishing it could be over.”

  Lette blinked at him slowly. She leaned back, failed to stop as she reached her tipping point, rocked back dangerously, managed to right herself with a minimum of grace, and blinked at him again.

  “Jealous,” she said.

  “What?” he said.

  “You’re just jealous,” she said, and flicked hair out of her eyes. “I got the glory. I got the kills. I’ve got just as much love as you do now. I’m blood-drenched and happy, and you’ve got a girlfriend who’s a boyfriend, and whose tits are, quite frankly, a bit saggy, and you’re jealous of me. And I’m glorious like a butterfly. And you’re not.”

  Balur decided, on the grounds that he had known Lette a long time, and that she was very drunk, and that he had probably said worse things to her, but mostly because no one else was looking, that he would not break her nose.

  Instead he cuffed her around the back of the head and left her to regain consciousness. Then he went and made very vigorous love to Cois, and at the end he was satisfied that every aspect of hir physicality was spectacular, and not saggy in the slightest.

  Afterward he lay beside hir, and hir thin, gentle arms draped across the solid breadth of his chest. He watched the soft down on them move with his breath.

  He realized he was still sober. Cois had a wineskin not far from hir bedroll. He considered getting up and taking it. Perhaps things would have gone better with Lette if he’d been drunk. Life generally seemed more fun when he was drunk.

  But he didn’t get up. He lay there and watched the soft white hairs move back and forth.

  “You’re not thinking about me,” said Cois, wriggling voluptuously beside him.

  “Lette is going to get herself killed,” he said. He couldn’t see any point in evasive subterfuge. He never had before, he wasn’t going to start now.

  “Why?” Cois’s finger traced convoluted designs across his chest.

  “I do not know.”

  “Does she?”

  Balur licked the air, tasted the scent of their bodies heavy on the air.

  “I do not think so.”

  “Would it make you feel better if she did? Or you did? Or both of you?”

  Balur licked the air again. He liked its taste. It soothed him the way that caving in a man’s skull normally did.

  “It would make me feel better if she stopped. If she was Lette.”

  Cois smiled into his side. He ran a finger up and down the ridges of hir spine, careful to not tear the skin with his claws.

  “Put some trousers on and come with me,” zhe said.

  “I am always having less fun with you when my trousers are being on,” he groused, but he did as zhe asked anyway.

  Zhe led him out of their makeshift tent and back out into the crowds that were encamped near the site of the would-be ambush. A line of men were still digging shallow graves for the dead. A few dragons still swooped back and forth above the trees. But for the most part, people seemed to be gathering for another of Will’s speeches.

  “I have been hearing many of these,” Balur said. “He is becoming very repetitive.”

  “I brought the wineskin.”

  “Fine then.”

  They found a spot on the ground near the back of the crowd. Cois rested hir head against him.

  These days, Will had a makeshift stage of wooden crates that he strode back and forth upon, delivering his speech, railing against all the—incredibly obvious—things that Barph had done wrong in this world. Balur was never quite sure why humans liked having these things enumerated for them, as if they could not do it themselves. Still, the crowd around him seemed happy, and Will puffed himself up like a sparrow in winter as he condemned it all. And there was a sense of energy and excitement to the event that Balur had to confess he quite enjoyed.

  “I like to come to these,” Cois whispered into his ear, hir breath tickling slightly. “I like to see these people this way.”

  Balur looked around at the crowd. “Unprepared and defenseless?” he asked.

  “They’re at their best listening to him,” zhe said. “That’s what he brings out in them.”

  “Not their best for battle.”

  “Look up at the edge of the stage.” Cois pointed with hir chin. Balur narrowed his eyes.

  Lette was there, standing in what would be the wings if Will had a respectable stage. She paced back and forth, just as Will paced. She didn’t look at the crowd but at him as he talked.

  “Why do you think she’s there?” asked Cois.

  “Because she is having terrible taste in men.” That was simple enough.

  “And why are you here in this crowd?”

  “Because you were asking me to be here,” he said. “You are knowing that.”

  Cois pulled away from him, swept an arm at the gathered crowd. “Why are all these people here?” zhe asked. “Why are you here in a forest with them? Wh
y did you end up in the Hallows?” Zhe smiled at him, at his confusion and his irritation, and leaned back against his heavy chest. “I promise, love, if you figure that out, then you’ll figure you and her out too.”

  “This is being like the hypothetical thing, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “You mean something that you will have to figure out for yourself?” Cois asked, imitating sweetness.

  He snarled, but stroked hir hair at the same time.

  “Let me put it to you this way,” zhe said. “You are here for a reason. Lette has a reason for being on the front lines of every fight. These people all have a reason for being in this crowd tonight.” Zhe rose up and kissed him. “It is the same reason for all of you. Although not all of you realize it yet. Apparently.”

  For all his faults—and Lette had always ensured Balur knew they were many—he was not stupid.

  “You are talking about Will,” he growled. And he had thought Cois thought better of him than that.

  “No,” zhe said. “I am not. Or … not exactly. Look at the crowd, Balur. Look at them.” There was something beyond hir usual teasing in hir voice, he realized. Something surprisingly urgent.

  He looked at them. The poor. The destitute. The desperate. All the fools who always seemed to be clinging to Will’s words. Why was he never on the side of the intelligent, well-armed people anymore?

  And why wasn’t he ever on those sides anymore?

  Was that what Cois was getting at?

  Because … because … Well, Lette was never on those sides anymore. She had hitched herself to Will and his foolish schemes. And he had … Wait. Was he as weak-willed as all that? Was he following Lette like some lamb waiting for his mistress to take him to the slaughterhouse?

  No. He was here because he chose to be here.

  He had his reasons for being here.

  “Oh gods,” he rumbled as realization struck him. “I am having a cause, aren’t I?”

  Zhe smiled at him. “I’m afraid so, love.”