bothered to learn them.”
Janni stopped at least. Stood there on the path, silent, solid- and live
looking, give or take the blood that smeared his face. Janni wanted badly to be
back among the living, for reasons not all of which were savory. Love was one.
And it was never a savory kind of love, the dead for the living. Janni had not
learned that.
Stilcho had. In that improbably small house he knew himself supplanted by the
living-perhaps fatally.
“You’re Rankene,” Janni said. “You somehow forget that, boy?”
“I don’t forget a thing. Look at me and tell me what I can forget. Look what
happened to us for your sake, while you were off a-heroing and left us this
sinkhole. And you come home with thanks, do you? Straton slaughters my
barracksmates for failing your precious purity and your Niko, that paragon of
virtue, falls straight into bed with the Nisi witch-“
“Lie.”
“The witch who killed you, man. Where’s his virtue? Sent to hell with the likes
of me and you? I don’t bloody care!”
Ischade half-heard the whisperings of her ghosts outside the house, the true and
the half-dead; and ignored them for the living inside-for the warm and living
and far more attractive person of the third Stepson, whose name was Straton. He
gazed at her, his head on her silken pillow, in her silk-strewn bed-chief
interrogator, chief torturer, when the Stepsons had to apply that art-soldier by
preference. He was a big man, a moodish man of wry humors and the most delicate
skills with a body (one could guess where acquired), and he would survive this