Her eyes drift down from the atrocity to the base of the spikes. She sees him for the first time since the day of her inaugural battle as a Savage. Laython is reclining in a bamboo chair draped with thick and perfectly tanned furs, stripped to the waist and enjoying the thickly redolent smoke of a long bone pipe. His massive, doughy torso is a mess of strange scars at whose origins Evie can’t even guess, but she refuses to let them evoke even the scantest wraith of sympathy within her.

Laython is staring up at the grotesque remains of his victims like a grandfather enjoying the warmth of the evening’s hearth on his weary bones. A scrawny Savage little more than a boy of thirteen or fourteen kneels beside his chair, carefully oiling Laython’s night-black leather armor pieces. In one moment the boy’s hand slips, and he compresses the oilskin too hard, drenching one of Laython’s pauldrons.

As Evie looks on, the chief tasker of the Savage Legion kicks the boy in the face with his bare foot. There’s no outrage in the strike, no emotion, there is only detached impulse. The boy falls onto his back, and Laython uses the same foot to press the side of his face into the grass.

“I’m sorry,” the boy squeaks. “I’m so sorry!”

Evie’s hand seems to move on its own, delving inside a special patch of fabric sewn into her blouse. Its purpose is concealing the cloth scabbard there and the small dagger it cradles. Her hand closes around the dagger’s smooth, worn, welcoming handle, and an inch of steel clears the sheath before Evie realizes what she’s doing and stays her hand.

You could do it, a voice very much like Sirach’s whispers inside her head. You could kill him. Right here and now. You know how to do it.

She does. Evie has certainly killed, but she has never murdered anyone in cold blood. She’s no assassin. But she was trained in the knife. She knows how to creep up silently from behind and clear his chin with her defending hand, knows where and how to apply pressure with the dagger’s edge, and how to slash so the blade opens his throat wide. He wouldn’t make any sound. He would simply wriggle like a fish for a few moments until the cold hand left in the wake of his fleeing life’s blood claimed him.

Laython lifts his foot away from the boy’s cheek and returns to smoking his pipe and gazing fondly at his macabre artistry. The boy pushes himself up from the grass, wiping the crushed green blades and rich black earth from his face with one hand.