But no, there was no mystery there. He had assumed the guise of a killer, hadn’t he? The young wide-eyed thief from Darujhistan had fashioned of himself a dire reflection – not of Apsalar the fisher-girl, but of Apsalar the assassin, the cold murderer. In the belief that likeness would forge the deepest bond of all. Perhaps that would have succeeded, had she liked her profession, had she not found it sordid and reprehensible. Had it not felt like chains wrapped tight about her soul.

She was not comforted by company within her prison. His love was for the wrong woman, the wrong Apsalar. And hers was for Crokus, not Cutter. And so they were together, yet apart, intimate yet strangers, and it seemed there was nothing they could do about it.

The assassin within her preferred solitude, and the fisher-girl had, from an entirely different path, come into a similar comfort. The former could not afford to love. The latter knew she had never been loved. Like Crokus, she stood in a killer’s shadow.

There was no point in railing against that. The fisher-girl had no life-skills of a breadth and stature to challenge the assassin’s implacable will. Probably, Crokus had similarly succumbed to Cutter.

She sensed a presence close by her side, and murmured, ‘Would that you had taken all with you when you departed.’

‘You’d rather I left you bereft?’

‘Bereft, Cotillion? No. Innocent.’

‘Innocence is only a virtue, lass, when it is temporary. You must pass from it to look back and recognize its unsullied purity. To remain innocent is to twist beneath invisible and unfathomable forces all your life, until one day you realize that you no longer recognize yourself, and it comes to you that innocence was a curse that had shackled you, stunted you, defeated your every expression of living.’

She smiled in the darkness. ‘But, Cotillion, it is knowledge that makes one aware of his or her own chains.’

‘Knowledge only makes the eyes see what was there all along, Apsalar. You are in possession of formidable skills. They gift you with power, a truth there is little point in denying. You cannot unmake yourself.’

‘But I can cease walking this singular path.’

‘You can,’ he acknowledged after a moment. ‘You can choose others, but even the privilege of choice was won by virtue of what you were—’

‘What you were.’

‘Nor can that be changed. I walked in your bones, your flesh, Apsalar. The fisher-girl who became a woman – we stood in each other’s shadow.’

‘And did you enjoy that, Cotillion?’