Karris looked at the weapons, and shook her head and waved her hand in denial, still making the motions large enough that they could be interpreted even by the farmers in the highest seats. “Oh, no, I shan’t need anything there, I think. But thank you.”

She glanced at Gavin as murmurs rippled through the crowd again. No weapons? What insanity was this? Was she simply committing suicide?

Gavin was still twitching, still obviously in great pain, but he said nothing, didn’t cry out in his agony, didn’t call out to Karris. He couldn’t see what was happening, and the not knowing would be driving him insane, but he held his silence. She knew at once it was because he trusted her. He knew she had a plan, and he knew it was desperate, and he wasn’t going to distract her from it.

For a man who’d been in control of everything, and been the driver of change in most of the great moments in the Seven Satrapies for the last two decades, to trust her that much moved her beyond words.

No time for that, dammit! She scrubbed a tear from her eye, a real one.

Unwilling to let her dominate the crowd’s eyes, Enki had stepped forward and raised both hands to heaven. “Orholam!” he cried. “Look upon the works of our hands! May your justice be done to traitors!”

He lowered his hands, and then took off his ghotra, as if this were connected to drawing Orholam’s attention. His black hair was woven with gold wire into clumps that hung past his shoulders. In Parian tradition, that hair was his glory, and he gloried in it.

The gesture wasn’t lost on the Ruthgari, who didn’t wear the ghotra, but were well aware of their neighbors’ beliefs about it. Nor were they immune to appreciating a handsome, athletic man who was six and a half feet tall.

He was like a smaller, vain version of Ironfist. Which was a bit disturbing, when Karris thought about it. Who picked a lover who looked so much like her own brother?

Karris walked up beside Enki and stood facing the Nuqaba’s box, waiting for him.

A flicker of doubt crossed his face. Karris was acting with such conviction that she could tell the big ignoramus thought that maybe these trials really were a tradition. He stood beside her, but not too close.

Around the spina in a circle, the Tafok Amagez drew in their colors. Any drafting would mean death.

Karris curtsied carefully to the Nuqaba and a steely-eyed Eirene Malargos. Beside her, Enki bowed deeply.

The crowd fell silent.

The Nuqaba waved a hand, signaling they could begin, but Karris ignored it. She turned to Enki and curtsied, more elaborately, an old court curtsy, with sweeping arms bringing her skirts wide, and her ankles crossed. Enki bowed to her, but carefully, keeping his eyes on her.

And … nothing happened.

Ben-hadad! It wasn’t supposed to be like this!

Enki lifted his sword and readied himself, while Karris stood on one foot, her right ankle pushing against her left calf.

“One moment,” Karris said. She held a finger up. “I have an itch.” She moved her right foot up and down her calf.

Enki looked at her, incredulous. Was she mad? And then he laughed.

And it was as if Ben-hadad had made the catch to be activated by laughter instead of by crossing her ankles, as they’d discussed. Karris felt the catch give and the big ridiculous ribbon on her right hip popped out and the luxin holding together layers of skirt and petticoats let go, swinging open like a door over her thigh, giving Karris access to the quick-release scabbard that covered the length of the inside of her thigh.

At the same time the skirts popped open, the scabbard swiveled from the inner thigh where it had been hidden during her search to her outer thigh and hand.

Most scabbards required a blade to be stabbed into them, and likewise, drawn vertically out before it could be used: they took two motions. This was a tension scabbard, holding the blade in a hug instead, letting the blade come out horizontally, so that one could draw as one slashed.

It was only a fraction of a heartbeat faster than a normal draw, but a fraction was all Karris needed. She sprang forward in the moment Enki’s eyes crinkled with laughter. Onetwothree steps, the back of her left hand batting his sword aside—

And she buried the blade under his chin at the very instant he realized she’d moved. She rammed it all the way to the hilt, its point jutting out, gleaming red above his glorious braids. She twisted the blade hard, breaking bones in his brainpan, taking no chances. A man could still kill you before he realized he was dead.

And then she jumped back, out of reach, pulling the dagger free.

Enki dropped to his knee, dropped flat on his face. Someone in the circle of Tafok Amagez shouted, but Karris barely heard it.

She stepped forward again, now that she saw he wouldn’t attack, and knelt at his body. She pulled back his braids and took the scimitar from his twitching fingers. Taking a fistful of braids, she stood, lifting the body to put pressure on the neck, and hacked with the dead man’s own scimitar. Once, and then twice, and a bit of quick sawing for the last of the skin, and Enki’s head came free of his body.

Karris held the head high in one hand and the scimitar high in the other, and suddenly, she could hear the crowd again, a vast roar of confusion and horror and awe and disbelief and cheering all intermixed. “Orholam has seen! Orholam’s justice has been done!” she shouted. But her voice was probably lost in the roar.

“I am Karris Guile, and this man is Gavin Guile, your Prism. He is Gavin Guile!” She was shouting at the top of her lungs, but it was lost in the clamor of fifty thousand voices. Only the nearest could hear. She could only hope it was enough.

She switched hands and swung the head back and forth as she drafted off the banners nearby. She flung the head and gave it a little extra push with luxin as she threw it.

Karris couldn’t have made the shot so perfectly if she’d tried it a hundred times. The head flew all the way into Eirene Malargos’s box and landed in the Nuqaba’s lap.

The Nuqaba began shrieking, and Orholam forgive them, many in the audience laughed.

Karris didn’t care. She moved to Gavin quickly and cut him free as the Tafok Amagez stood around, baffled.

Oh, Orholam. Gavin’s face. His face!

“Gavin,” she said, “we have to run. Can you—”

“I won’t let you down,” he said, but when he stood, he almost collapsed. He put his left hand up to his face, and two of his fingers were gone. Those fucking animals.

But what mattered now was that Gavin was in no shape to fight.

Karris steadied him. Around her, the Tafok Amagez looked uncertain as to what they should be doing. She had won a trial that their Nuqaba had established, so they should let her go, but then, she’d also thrown the head of one of their leaders into the Nuqaba’s lap, so, should they arrest her? Could they, after what she’d just done?

There was no point in waiting to find out what they decided.

But just then, one of the hippodrome guards ran to the steps of the spina. “It is Gavin Guile!” he shouted. “I recognize him from the old days! They dyed his hair and dirtied his face, but he is Gavin Guile!”

Karris veritably pulled Gavin down the steps, and the soldier fell in with them, desperately signaling to other Guile family troops to join them.

“Kill them!” the Nuqaba shrieked suddenly. “Kill them both!” Karris shot a look over at her. She was covered with blood. More blood than you’d think would leak out of a man’s severed head. She’d smeared it somehow on her face.