That might have been what did it. Surrounding herself with flower people and singing ‘Give Peace a Chance’ at Vietnam rallies might have been just the thing she needed to plant the seed in her head that maybe, just maybe, she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life killing people. She already had blood on her hands. How many murderers, thieves, traitors and conspirators had she killed by the early seventies? She didn’t want to know. They were scarcely innocent, but that had stopped mattering a long time ago.

Maybe it was the flower people. Maybe it was John and Yoko, spending days in that bed. Whatever it was, whatever made her decide to quit, it was accompanied by music. Not this music, as she sat in this opera house twenty years later, unseen by all those people below her, and not the music of today, not Nirvana or Curve or Jeff Buckley, but music nonetheless. Zeppelin. Sabbath. Bowie. To someone, of course, Luciano Pavarotti was their Robert Plant. Maybe even to the man she was here to protect. She spied him over there, sitting in his private box, eyes on the Three Tenors. The box was dark and otherwise empty. She only knew two things about him – she knew where he’d be sitting tonight and she knew someone wanted him dead. She didn’t even know his name.

A shadow moved past the outline of the door behind him, and Tanith tensed. It came back, hovered there a moment before slowly moving away again.

Tanith stood, climbed the rigging to the very top and folded her body till her feet touched the ceiling. Using one hand to keep the sword on her back from slipping out of its scabbard, she hurried upside down along the curved dome to the open balcony. A woman in black stood at the door to the target’s box, a sword in her hand. No one around. Tanith flipped almost soundlessly to the red carpet, but the woman in black heard her anyway and spun.

They looked at each other for a moment, and the woman in black narrowed her eyes. “Highborn?” she said.

Tanith’s heart wanted to leap to her throat. She forced herself to smile, to keep her voice level. “Hello, Avaunt,” she said.

Avaunt stepped away from the door. “They told me about you,” she said. “You abandoned us.”

God, Tanith’s throat was dry. “There is no law against leaving. My brother did it.”

“Another traitor,” said Avaunt. “And now you’ve joined him in his disgrace. Little Miss Highborn. Too good for the rest of us.”

Moving slowly, Tanith slid out her sword as Avaunt drew closer. “I never really understood where all this animosity came from,” she said, “and now that I finally have the chance to ask, I realise I just don’t care any more. You’re here to kill a man. I’m here to stop you.”