Sirach doffs her wide-brimmed hat and twirls it down the narrow, rocky path. With several different aching groans in succession, she rises to her feet.

Evie follows suit, almost without thinking, again grasping the tsuka of her short sword and using it to pull herself up. Once she’s on her feet, she plucks the sword from the ground and shakes the dirt from the tip of the blade.

“So now we’ll try to kill each other, then?” Evie asks.

“I imagine you might contend that I owe you, that I should allow you to walk away as you allowed me to do.”

“You don’t owe me anything. After what you’ve just told me… I almost feel I owe you.”

“We shall call it even, then.”

Evie manages a nod.

“Well, then. This time, yes,” Sirach pronounces. “I’m afraid one of us dies.”

Sirach reaches behind both hips and draws forth a pair of matched daggers, their blades long and thin and so sharply curved they’re almost half circles.

“Delicate,” Evie remarks.

Sirach grins cattishly. “Aren’t we all?”

They square off, standing just several strides apart, both women bending their knees slightly and leveling their feet with their shoulders.

Evie grips the tsuka of her sword in both hands and holds it at the ready.

Sirach holds her matched blades at different angles, her arms sweeping in hypnotic arcs as she executes a few practice form movements to loosen herself up.

The bolt strikes Sirach dead center of her chest. Upon impact her body folds inward before being flung back against the rocks. She collapses in the dirt in almost the precise spot she was sitting before.

This time, however, there’s no visible sign she’s breathing.

Evie turns toward the direction of the sudden crossbow bolt, raising her sword just in time to intercept a squat figure that leaps at her from atop the larger boulders, blotting out the sun in the process. The switch from burning bright to pitch dark temporarily blinds Evie as the impact knocks her off her feet. She feels something bite into the blade of her short sword. She instinctually tightens her grip on the tsuka and pushes back against that weapon or sudden force, even as her back hits the unyielding ground.

Once she blinks the world back into focus, she finds herself staring at her blade entangled in a field of spikes. Those spikes are embedded in the half-face of a man Evie remembers as Namrok, the blood coin hunter. There is no mistaking him with a dominant feature such as that. His right arm is occupied with the crossbow it still supports, but his left hand has gripped her wrist and is attempting to wrest her hand from the tsuka. Evie responds by dragging the blade horizontally through the spikes, its bottom slicing across Namrok’s ear, drawing blood.