1.7. Reasonable People

“Seth,” Annalise cried, and he heard her clattering behind him, her sharp, determined breath, and oh no she was fast as fuck.

He zig-zagged around a tree, trying to break her vision, and then there was a squelch and something cold and viscous was glued to his leg, clinging leaves to him, and when he put his hand on it to see what it was his hand was stuck too, now.

She’d hexed him. The Weaver on her arm was hunkered now behind its web.

“Fucking chancer.” She laughed harshly and yanked him across the forest floor on his stomach, through the thickening muck. “Get your skinny arse—do not struggle with me, il Gutierre.”

A cuff locked around his wrist.

“I’m just finding a place to hide,” he protested. “Just getting out of the—”

She slapped the other end of the cuff onto a sturdy young tree’s skyward limb. “That would have been nice to have in the actual fight. You know how these work?” She peeled her sleeve up the massive ivory pillar of her forearm and pointed a finger at an illustration in the intricate weave of them. A web, behind which an illustrated spider hid as if in waiting for a dermatic fly. “You better hope none of those bleeding gougers on our tail manage to disarm me, ‘cause I just blew an active on you and now my sticky fingers are gone for an hour. Dumbshite.”

“Please,” he said, voice thin and desperate. “It wasn’t my—Please, Madam Verdugo. Just let me go and I’ll stay out of trouble. I’ll find a roadhouse with a kitchen. I can cook on a line.”

“Shut up.”

“I’ll stay the hell away from men like Rohan. Seraphs take me, I will.”

“Shut up. For a bleeding second.” She leaned forward so their eyes were level. “Listen to me, Seth il Gutierre, and listen good, cause there’s no time to repeat myself. I thought this was obvious, but maybe it isn’t. I’m not gonna execute you, goofy little fuckup that you are.”

His next round of pleas faltered. “You’re not?”

“You stole my stuff,” she said. “Hence the unkind name. But you were set up and chumped out. I believe that. I’d be a raging bitch to all-the-way blame you for that. They don’t go and blame the sword when I take a head off with it. Well—they do, sort of, but in poetical terms. I sentence you to helping me find what you stole and stealing it back, plus one whack on the ear.”

She gave him a light smack upside the head.

“Ow,” he said.

“You’re a wee shaggy wild animal right now, shrinking from every hand that comes near you and pissing in the dirt, and now it’s time to go bipedal and put big boy pants on. So cop the fuck on. No more running, right? No more ducking and dodging. From now on, you stand in one spot, stick at one thing, and fucking well apply yourself to something better than this, something that doesn’t get people fucking chasing you out of every billet you bed in.”

“I’m just a thief. I’m—”

“You’re not just a thief.” She shoved a black-clad finger in his face. “You’re a thief who stole from a Verdugo and lived.”

“So far.”

“I know there is something worth something in you, Seth il Gutierre. And I’m sure you’ve had many posh and prancey people tell you that, and you’ve said, oh aye ma’am, I’ll turn my newest new leaf over tomorrow morning, you’ll see. But those people couldn’t whack your fucking head the fuck off.” Her biting burr turned the fuck into a fook. “And I can. And when I say it, you listen.”

He listened.

A hex-engine in the distance, its mite traps clattering, its dynamo echoing like an enraged beast. Annalise’s dark brows lowered. She removed her sunglasses from a hip pocket and flicked their arms open. “Righty-o. Hope you’re not queasy about blood. You’re like as not to see some.”

“Can you uncuff me?” he asked.

“It’s like I said.” She slipped her sunglasses on. “I’ll handle it.”

Louder came the engine, and louder, and then its roar died to a rumble, and then it stopped. Annalise removed her coat, folded it, and placed it in Demetrius’ saddlebag. She murmured soft encouragement to the horse, rubbed his nose, and stepped away.

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It was as she limbered herself, raising her elbow and rolling her shoulder, that Seth finally forced himself to admit that striking was damning the Verdugo with faint praise.

Every woman Seth had ever met—had ever been with—had grown up on the Plainland. A Plainland life thinned you out, made you willowy and slight and sunkissed. None of them had ever had the diet, the training, the tattoos, and the sheer genetic good fortune to look like the Verdugo. She wasn’t thin, certainly—her waist was solid as a tree trunk. But her shoulders and hips were wide and strapping and in proportion to shape a plentiful, feminine hourglass out of her curves, and the combination of strength and softness was—

Sharp voices echoed in through the trees. Snapping twigs. Seth’s vision was pried away from Annalise al Ydris’s big butt.

She hopped lightly on tiptoes a handful of times until her heavy stance had gone loose and slinky. She stepped in front of Seth (that orange peel and leather again) and squared her broad shoulders.

Saints, she looked strong. Like smiling death.

The half-dozen men who picked their way through the trees surely thought so, too, because their chest-voiced bravado and their purposeful gaits slowed as they came into view, their bristling weaponry held a little closer to their own vitals.

Annalise glanced backward over her illustrated trapezius at the hapless pickpocket she’d handcuffed to a tree. “Wink,” she whispered. Then she turned to the approaching murderers, and nodded. “Alright, gents.”

Polecat was in the lead, of course. Rohan’s homicidal handpick. He nodded back. “Madam Verdugo.”

“So glad to see this little weasel hasn’t given you the slip.” This from a unibrowed man with a matched set of quillon daggers in his belt and a mite-rifle slung on his back. Prichard the prick.

“That’s right,” Annalise said, cool and professional. “He’s in my custody.”