The thought was very distant. So was the knowledge that she rather liked the Count Palantine and his wife, and that if it had been peacetime she would have enjoyed visiting the Eastermark with Delia and Rigobert and the children. They had some astonishing falconry here, if you could call using great golden eagles to hunt pronghorn antelope that.

And the Count had mentioned a hunting and skiing lodge in the Blue Mountains that he’d be glad to lend her sometime, obviously one of his favorite haunts. Bear hunts, and sleigh rides, and cross-country skiing in cold that was dry and hard and bracing, not the damp bone-chill of the Willamette. Lioncel and Diomede would love that; they’d tire themselves out, shovel down big dinners and sleep like the dead, and she and Delia could make love on tigerskins before a great roaring fire.

I am going soft in my old age.

She smiled and slid the dagger a little closer under the pillow. There was something about the approach of a knife aimed at you that you could feel. And there was a shadow of a shadow on the wall away from the windows, a suggestion of movement. It would vanish if she tried to focus on it, but if you didn’t try to do that it was clear as noon; and also the back of her right hand itched. That might be . . .

What was the old word? Ah, psychosomatic. Or it might not.

“Now,” she said conversationally.

And flipped herself out of the bed, pulling at her heel and twisting herself around in midair to land in a fighting crouch, knife out with the point low and left forearm across her body with the palm and fingers stiffened into another weapon.

The dagger in the assassin’s hand was already streaking down towards the spot where her back had been an instant before. The man had his full weight behind it, flinging himself forward and down to drive the length of watered steel all of its twelve inches deep and hard enough that the flaring edges would slice apart the ribs.

Good professional stroke, Tiphaine thought. That would have done it nicely. You want to kill someone with a knife, don’t waste time on fancy.

Two more Cutters in dark clothing were climbing in through the windows. Armand and Rodard dropped silently from where they’d been waiting, heels braced on the little ledges above. Both struck the men below feetfirst, and the crossbows the assassins had been carrying dropped; one went off, and the bolt struck the plaster and board of an interior wall with a crunching whap. The sworn killers of the Church Universal and Triumphant always operated in threes; it was one of the few things they had in common with the Mackenzies.