Katsa climbed out of the fountain and hung the straps of her shoes over her wrists. She ran.

Chapter Eight

THE ARCHERY RANGE was empty, and dark except for the lone torch that glowed outside the equipment room. Katsa lit the torches along the back of the range so that when she returned to the front, the man-shaped dummies stood black against the brightness behind them. She grabbed a bow randomly from the supplies and collected handfuls of the lightest-colored arrows she could find. Then she drove arrow after arrow into the knees of her targets. Then the thighs, then the elbows, then the shoulders, until she’d emptied her quiver. She could disarm or disable any man with this bow at night, that was clear enough. She exchanged the bow for another. She yanked the arrows from the targets. She began again.

She’d lost her temper at dinner, and for no reason. Randa hadn’t spoken to her, hadn’t even looked at her, had only said her name. He loved to brag of her, as if her great ability were his doing. As if she were the arrow, and he the archer whose skill drove her home. No, not an arrow—that didn’t quite capture it. A dog. To Randa she was a savage dog he’d broken and trained. He set her on his enemies and allowed her out of her cage to be groomed and kept pretty, to sit among his friends and make them nervous.

Katsa didn’t notice her heightened speed and focus, the ferocity with which she was now whipping arrows from her quiver, the next arrow notched in the string before the first had hit home. Not until she sensed the presence behind her shoulder did she stir from her preoccupation and realize how she must look.

She was savage. Look at her speed, look at her accuracy, and with a poor bow, curved badly, strung badly. No wonder Randa treated her so.

She knew it was the Lienid who stood behind her. She ignored him. But she slowed her movements, made a show of taking aim at thighs and knees before she fired. She became conscious of the dirt under her feet and remembered, too, that she was barefoot, with her hair falling around her shoulders and her shoes in a pile somewhere near the equipment room. He would have noticed. She doubted there was much those eyes didn’t notice. Well, he wouldn’t have kept such stupid shoes on his feet, either, or left pins in his hair if his scalp were screaming. Or perhaps he would. He seemed not to mind his own fine jewelry, in his ears and on his fingers. They must be a vain people, the Lienid.

“Can you kill with an arrow? Or do you only ever wound?”

She remembered his raspy voice from Murgon’s courtyard, and it was taunting her now, as it had done then. She didn’t turn to him. She simply took two arrows from her quiver, notched them together, pulled, and released. One flew to her target’s head, and the other to its chest. They hit with a satisfying thud, and glowed palely in the flickering torchlight.