Tam loved his sisters. He loved them more than he could express, more than life, possibly more than he loved Val, even. He didn’t see any way that could possibly change. But there were times that they terrified him.

  The morning after Herald’s birthday party had been fine. He’d stopped — or been stopped from — drinking when Herald decided that she needed to get seriously drunk to get two giant holes poked through her ear. He’d switched to draining Mak’s stock of virgin grape juice — always on hand, since she liked the taste but couldn’t handle wine anymore — and thanks to that he’d been practically sober once he and Val got to bed, which they’d both enjoyed.

  The downside was that he hadn’t been nearly drunk enough to watch Mak shove a giant needle through their baby sister’s ear, so he’d volunteered to fetch a mirror, waited outside the upstairs door until the screaming stopped, and then came down to admire how good their present looked on her. And it did look stunning. Herald had never had trouble looking fierce when she wanted to, with her height and her shoulders, but with three golden dragons’ worth of… well, golden dragon on her ear, she looked downright dangerous. A little too much, even, and he’d said so, in a roundabout way.

  She’d playfully pretended to stab him in the head.

  Not that he thought she ever would, but the Herald of six months ago would never even have joked about something like that.

  But a lot of things had happened in those six months. A lot of things had changed. And Tam knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he could point out the cause for the changes in his sisters’ behavior and temperament.

  It came down to Draka, of course. Draka. Friend, benefactor, beloved adopted sister, matriarch-in-the-shadows of their House. The dark terror of the harbor. He’d gone downstairs in the morning to talk to her, only to find out that she’d left to learn to swim. Apparently she’d wanted to do that for some time.

  He never quite knew what to think when it came to her. She confused him, and she terrified him, and he loved her. And he knew that he came by that love honestly. It wasn’t like Kira or Ardek or a bunch of others — his sisters included, sadly — who had no choice in the matter. He’d talked to Mak about it, and she’d been open and honest about her feelings for the dragon. She trusted Draka above herself, and valued her life and happiness above her own. She couldn’t wish Draka harm. She was sure that the others couldn’t either.

  Tam damn well could. There were two things he’d never truly forgive Draka for: what she’d done to Herald, and what she’d done to Mak. Even if he understood why she’d done them. Or, “why they’d happened” might be a better way to put it, since she apparently hadn’t had any control over it. Sometimes he wanted to hack her tail in half. When he’d told her not to come back without Herald, he’d meant it.

  And he knew how to deal with mindbenders. Meet enough people and you’d come across quite a few. You’d probably befriend one or two. The trick was to learn to evaluate everybody once they were far away, to see if it made sense that you liked them as much as you thought you had. And not to judge them if it turned out you didn’t. From what he’d seen, you didn’t get an Advancement like that unless you were pretty broken.

  No, he was sure that he and Val were unaffected by whatever hold Draka had on the others. He loved her because the harm she’d done paled in comparison to the good things she’d brought into their lives: she’d saved their lives, she’d made them rich, and no matter how she’d done it, she’d made his human sisters happier than he’d seen them since their father died.

  He just wished that she hadn’t made Mak and Herald so damned scary.

  They left to deal with Vestel well after sundown. He’d had his doubts, as had Val. This wasn’t like when they’d ambushed that bastard Tarkarran — this was an assault, against an enemy that was, by Ardek’s estimation, prepared for trouble. But Mak hadn’t even needed to use her authority as head of the House. She’d convinced them. Had to be done, couldn’t be helped, and it was better they do it themselves, without Draka’s help, and without involving the law.

  Speaking of the law, they had guards watching the inn, so they crossed the wall between their yard and the neighboring property and snuck out that way. Not a guarantee of secrecy, but easy enough to do.

  They were heading to a gambling house in the north city. Ardek had already posted up to keep an eye on the place, with a couple of kids standing by in case he needed to run them a message. The rest of them walked quickly and with purpose along back streets, heavy raincoats covering armor and hidden blades. Herald, of course, wore her golden dragon, and every so often it would catch the light of some lamp, a warm flash in the dark.

  They moved as a unit, years of experience letting them easily keep track of each other and stay in formation. Tam knew that Draka was following them on the rooftops, invisible in the shadows. He couldn’t see her, but Mak and Herald kept throwing glances. They always knew exactly where she was. It was inordinately creepy.

  Few people were out. Nobody bothered them.

  The gambling house was very different from the ones Tam used to frequent. Those were rundown storefronts or half-hidden cellars in the slums. This was a brightly lit building, with music and cheering and people with umbrellas coming and going. It was three stories tall, and their target could be anywhere inside. They could have snuck around the back, scaled the walls — probably — and done this silently. They chose not to.

  They didn’t go through the guests, though. Nobody wanted that. Too many innocent people just having a good time who might get in harm's way. Instead they went in a side door, nobody giving them a second glance as they crossed the street into the adjoining alley. The door was locked, but they’d expected that. It shouldn’t slow them down.

  While Tam lit a lantern Val produced a crowbar, but when he approached the door, Mak held her hand out, palm up. Val handed the tool over without a word. And then Mak got scary.

  With a force that made Tam jump, Mak slammed the crowbar into the narrow space between the jamb and the door, splintering wood and chipping stone. She set her feet, then twisted around her hips so quick and hard that she blurred. The door flew open with a Snap of splintering wood and shearing metal as both door and lock failed.

  Right. Mak was small, and Val could lift her above his head easily enough, but she had strength that would put a big ol’ bear of a sailor with a strength Advancement to shame, as long as she could keep draining Nest Hearts — which was a whole insane thing in itself. It was easy to forget. That wasn’t what really made her scary, though. No, that was demonstrated in the next few moments.

  Tam had never been comfortable with fighting people. He did it when he had to. He was even good at it. But he didn’t like it. Val was okay with it, but he’d been a soldier once, back in Marbek, and he’d had the hesitation drilled out of him. Mak and Herald, though? They’d taken to killing like a flame to silk, and he worried if they’d even be able to hold back.

  They drew their weapons, and Herald vanished. The guard inside the door barely had his sword half out of its scabbard when Mak, all five-foot-on-a-good-day of her, kneed him in the face. She’d taken a standing leap to do it, crossing the six or so feet between them in a blink. She was exactly on target, and the force was enough to lift the man off his feet. She rode him down, the other knee on his shoulder, and a left hook made sure that he wasn’t getting up anytime soon.

  “Tam?” she whispered, looking over her shoulder.

  Tam snapped out of his surprise at what had just happened. He asked his gut where to go, and his gut answered. “Top floor?” he said, looking at the man on the floor. He had his doubts about whether that guy was ever getting up. There was just too much blood coming out his nose.

  Mak followed his eyes, then stepped off the guy. She grabbed his waistband and flipped him on his stomach so the blood would drain away instead of back into his lungs, then shrugged. A kind of, “if he dies, he dies,” gesture.

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  “Go on, then,” she said, jerking her head toward the stairs. “Top floor!”

  Somewhere up there, something tumbled down the stairs. When Tam reached the second landing, he had to step over a man who lay groaning at the foot of the steps, a gash on his head bleeding into the wood.

  He got to the top, and the left side of his body felt like it had been bathed in ice water. “Danger left!” he hissed, and he, Val and Mak all turned to face the incoming threat. There was a door there, and a shadow lengthened and snapped into place beside it. The door opened, and a large man stepped through it, a cudgel in his left hand. He saw them standing there and his eyes widened.

  “Intrud—!”

  His shout ended in a scream as the shadow snapped out and popped him in the unmentionables. Then Mak slammed her shoulder into his midsection, having covered the ten feet between them in the time it took Tam to breathe.

  The room beyond the door erupted into chaos. Tam heard his sister roar “Vestel!” with fire and fury, and it was all he could do to connect it to his older sister’s sweetly musical voice. “Give us Vestel, and live to see the solstice!”

  Ever since Mak broke the door open downstairs, Tam had a feeling of being entirely surplus to requirement. That feeling only grew stronger when he and Val went through the door. Mak was getting mobbed, and she didn’t even have her sword out. She didn’t need it. It didn’t matter what Advancements Vestel’s thugs had. Strength, speed, reflexes, nothing could help them as Mak almost literally danced around the room, breaking knees, arms and jaws with punches or strikes with her palms and elbows. She’d never been much good with unarmed combat, but she didn’t need to be. Where she lacked skill and technique, strength, speed, and agility more than made up for it. And she wasn’t alone. When someone tried to get her from behind, like a large man with a cudgel, a nearby shadow flicked out and the man’s wrist opened up, his weapon clattering to the floor as the tendons were severed. It could just as easily have been his throat, but neither sister seemed to be aiming for killing blows. Not ones that killed immediately, at any rate.

  Mak was silent as she fought. Herald, if he heard her right under the screams and shouts of Vestel’s thugs, was laughing.

  What are Val and I even doing here? Tam asked himself. We could be playing bones downstairs and nothing would be different.

  Beside Tam, Val said, “Remarkable.” Then he joined the fray, and Tam followed him by reflex.

  There had been seven thugs in the room. Mak and Herald had hurt or disabled most of them in the few seconds before Tam and Val joined in, and at that point putting them down or making them surrender was just a formality. Few criminals were so loyal to their bosses that they’d keep fighting through a broken arm and a wrenched knee.

  They didn’t bother questioning anyone. There was only one other door besides the one they’d come in. While Tam, Val, and presumably Herald kept an eye on the injured men, Mak kicked that door to splinters, somehow anchoring herself with her grounded foot so that all the force of her kicks went into the wood. She’d had perfect balance, or some such nonsense, ever since Draka left to bring back Herald.

  Once the door caved in, Mak went through. A man shouted in outrage, then howled in pain, and then tumbled out to lie among his men, his arm bent at a nauseating angle below the elbow. Mak came out holding a sword. By the blade. In her bare hand.

  “Vestel,” she said. Her tone was calm. Relaxed. Conversational. Terrifying, as she stepped past a man with a twisted knee, whose friend was wrapping a makeshift bandage around a deep cut on his arm. “Why did you attack my inn?”

  “I’m not—!” was as far as he got, his voice strained with pain, before Mak snapped a kick at his hip. There was a deep, muffled Crunch, and the man who Tam dearly hoped was Vestel slid along the floor with a guttural groan.

  “You’re not what?” Mak asked, taking a step to stay next to him. “You’re not sure?”

  “Can’t!” he gasped out.

  Mak kicked him in the knee. Another Crunch. Another scream. Mak grabbed him by the collar, lifting him seemingly without effort.

  “Can’t tell me? Your hirelings said the same thing. But here we are.”

  “Die before—”

  “Fine by me.”

  Mak took a firm grip on his waistband and hurled him. The window in the middle of the room exploded outwards, and Vestel — Mercies, please let that be Vestel — vanished into the night, hitting the cobbles with a Thud before the screaming started downstairs.

  The next man Mak went to question didn’t know, but he knew who to ask, and that man spoke up before Mak ever reached him. When he’d answered her questions, Mak simply turned and walked out of the room.

  The haunted look in her eyes was somehow less frightening than the calm with which she’d killed Vestel.

  As they left, Tam checked on the men on the stairs and by the door. Both were still alive. If the Mercies willed it, only Vestel would have died tonight. And maybe, just maybe, they wouldn’t have burned any good will the lady justice Sempralia might have toward them. If that even mattered anymore.

  “Parvion. Sorrows-begotten Parvion!”

  They were back in the cellar. Mak was furious and Tam dearly wanted to hug her, but she sat high on the rack of barrels that divided the space, out of reach of anyone except Herald and Draka.

  “It’s not for certain,” Val said, calm and steady. “This man, Onur, supposedly works for them, but that doesn’t mean that he spoke to Vestel on their behalf.”

  “He’s their damn head of household security!” Mak snapped. She never snapped. Not at them. “Do you think he’d have that job if he didn’t work for them and only them?”

  “Mak!” Tam scolded, putting his arm around Val protectively. Not that Val needed it; his skin was thicker than that, and he was an understanding man. It was more for Tam’s own sake than anything.

  Mak sighed. “Sorry.”

  “Do you think that they know?” Herald asked, looking around the room. “Should they not have gone after the Tesprils instead, if they know?”

  “Maybe not.” Draka spoke up, and all eyes were immediately on her. When the dragon spoke, everyone listened. “I agree with Mak that this Onur fellow is probably working on behalf of Parvion. Why else would a bunch of thugs know who he is? But we don’t know that they know Tark was working with the Night Blossom. Even if they do, they may not know who the Night Blossom really is. I think this is more likely to be connected to me. It could even be… political.”

  The dragon practically spat the word, and on that sentiment, Tam agreed completely. Politics. Through no fault of their own, they’d become political. It came with the money and the dragon, so it wasn’t all bad, but still.

  “They had damn keys! Onur gave them keys!” Mak growled.

  The silence stretched, each of them lost in their own thoughts until it became unbearable. “So, what now?” Tam asked. “Do we go after this Onur fellow, or what?”

  “I could pay the patriarch a visit,” Draka suggested, and Tam’s blood ran cold at her tone. Mak was staring at the dragon, and she had that look where she wanted to say something but literally couldn’t, and was trying to find a way to get the words out.

  Well, if she couldn’t say it, he could.

  “Please don’t,” he said, and Draka looked at him with a little quirk of her head that he interpreted as an invitation to continue. “Vestel’s dead, right?”

  “Probably,” Draka said. “He didn’t move once he hit the street. Third floor onto the cobbles… yeah. Probably dead.”

  “And we left ten men badly injured but alive behind us. Most of whom got a good look at us. Word’s going to get out, which was half the point, I recognize that, but it’s going to get back to the lady justice soon enough.”

  “Right, yeah.”

  “Can’t imagine she’s going to be happy. It’s going to look a whole lot like we’re using our connection to you to put ourselves above the law.”

  Nods all around.

  “Unfortunate, but kind of necessary,” Tam continued. “But the lady justice will, I hope, be able to let it go. Vestel attacked us, and we have someone who can back us up on that. But if you go after someone like the Parvion patriarch… that family’s wealthy, right? No doubt, they’re heavily connected. And I’m sure you could go in and do what you do, but… I just see too many things that could go wrong.”

  “All right,” Draka spoke with finality, and settled down a little. “You’re probably right about them being connected. There was a Tribune Parvion with General Sarvalian, too. But we’re going to need to have words with this Onur.”

  On that, they all agreed. And Tam was very, very glad that he was not Onur.

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