Shaitaan frowned down at her eggs. The formless yellow lumps frowned back from the scarred wooden plate, bland and soft as moldy mud, and she grimaced to think of how low she'd condescended if this were the only meal left to her.

  She hated eggs. Always had. When she'd been in Xoactl, every meal seemed a banquet. She'd regularly dined in the halls of governors and merchant lords, and their tables had been overflowing with delicacies from the breadth of the empire. Roasted sage chickens stuffed with yellow peppers and rice, baked fern apples filled with cinnamon cream, flat breads crusted with ivory nuts and dried cherries and drizzled with honey, and river deer tenderloins wrapped in bacon and stewed in spiced curry.

  But all that was in Xoactl, and she was not. She was exiled north to the cold, gray, muddy frontier lands, beyond the borders of her homeland. This was home to milk-skinned mongrels and degenerates and their tasteless, formless food. These eggs were as much a part of her punishment as the bad weather and the ravenous wolves that stalked just beyond the torchlight of this backwater town.

  She'd not wanted the eggs, but they were all she could get. She'd tried to hunt deer. She'd made her own bow from what wood grew in these rocky hills, and she'd stayed awake all night on a cliff above a well-traveled game trail until the creatures appeared like ghosts in the foggy dawn. But when she drew the bow, she'd fumbled the string. The arrow had flown straight into the trunk of a nearby tree, and the deer had bolted into the cover of the forest. Shaitaan really was a poor hunter...of deer, anyhow.

  She never got another chance that day, and hunger had driven her back to the town, where she sold her blanket—one of her very last Xoactali possessions besides the sash around her waist and the sword wrapped in rags on her back—for enough coin for a meal. The trader had been stingy, claiming he would hardly be able to sell her foreign rags for more than a few copper beggars, even though the blanket had originally been a gift from a Xoactali merchant's wife and worth more than this milk-skinned trader's stocked wagon. She would miss that blanket, if not for it's sentimental, cultural, or monetary value, than for it's warmth on frequent chilly nights.

  The few copper beggars were barely enough to pay the innkeeper, who she was sure had overcharged her for the eggs because she was foreign. He'd given her a plate but no fork, as though it were some scathing insult to make her eat with her fingers. It didn't surprise Shaitaan these milk-skinned heathens needed tools to help them eat; no one in this place seemed to ever wash their hands.

  But Shaitaan had hardly the chance to take even a small piece of the already cold, mushy eggs when a shadow crept over her table. She looked up into the face of, if not the ugliest man she'd ever seen, then certainly the ugliest she'd seen all morning. It was like the gods were trying to sculpt a dog's rear end out of a human face.

  "Don't you think you ought to be eating outside, Darkie?" He growled around a mouth full of brown teeth. Sores clung to the underside of his double-chin like bats in a cavern, and his eye patch was so badly skewed she could still quite clearly see into the cavity that had once held a piggy eye to match the other.

  "You def, Darkie?" Ugly prodded again. He grabbed Shaitaan's plate of eggs and held them under her nose. "YOUR KIND EAT OUTSIDE!" He blurted each word, pausing between them as though making a heroic effort to frighten her or make her understand...or perhaps to simply speak his mind. He tossed her plate towards the shabby door to the muddy street outside, and it bounced and flipped, showering a couple of oddly-dressed women with bouncing flecks of yellow egg.

  "Oh, come on!" cried one of them in frustration. She swept a tall pointed hat off her head to brush bits of yellow off it. "You never get the DEX save when you really need it."

  Shaitaan didn't understand this odd statement, and so she ignored it. She had other pressing matters in front of her.

  The whole inn fell quiet, the usual cacophony of hushed conversations and lecherous laughter dying as quickly as if it had been stabbed. The eyes of forty men, cutthroats and criminals, smugglers and fur-traders, deserters and drunkards, all fell on Shaitaan and Ugly, who seemed pleased with the audience he'd drawn to their little drama. The only people in the room who didn't seem interested in what might happen next were the women near the door, who were still complaining about the bits of egg they were picking out of their hair and clothes.

  As Ugly tried his best to loom over her, Shaitaan mentally explored her options. She could do nothing, of course, but Ugly might take her passivity as permission to heap more abuse on her. She could walk away, but she knew this would label her as a coward in a place where any sign of weakness was as good as a death sentence.

  And then, there was always the option to fight. This idea seemed to almost come to her like a suggestion, as though the bright, curved metal of the sword on her back had whispered to her. Give me your hand, it seemed to say, and I will teach these barbarians etiquette, I will make them scream apologies, I will carve your name into their backs as they run, just as I had in sweeter days past.

  She actually felt her hand twitch in sympathy with that whisper. Her fingers flexed and her palm itched to be filled with a familiar grip, but she shook the dark suggestion off her. It was not for to pity for the milk-skinned fool sneering down at her. If the gods were just, she would see him spending the last few minutes of his life prying his own teeth from the dirty, spit-slick wooden floor boards with broken fingers. But if Shaitaan were to make a new life for herself, one in which she wasn't hunted like an animal, she would have to do things differently than she had in the past, and that meant leaving this fool alive, and probably with his teeth in his head, though to continue living with such teeth was perhaps punishment enough. If her past was to remain behind her, she would have to leave it behind her.

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  The sword laughed, as though it knew better.

  She ignored it. She could handle this on her own, and she didn't need her blade to make her answer a strong one. She would have to make an example of Ugly, lest she lose more than her eggs that morning.

  She stood and threw the table aside. It flipped end over end and bowled over some chairs before stopping at the base of another table. Several patrons stood out of the way of the clattering furniture, their hands suddenly full of plates and tankards with a dexterity not apparent before the morning's curiosities began. She was now only inches away from Ugly, closer, even. Close enough she could have kissed him. Where he'd loomed over her before while she sat, she now loomed over him, her mouth even with his remaining eye.

  To his credit, Ugly seemed unfazed. He didn't flinch at her speed, at her height, or even at her war braids or the medallions and bones woven into them. He might have been provoking her to do just this, Shaitaan realized. He'd shown boldness in facing her alone, even if she was a woman, and fools like this were never that bold. They always wanted help close at hand, which meant the men standing closest to him were likely in on the fun, his closest friends. He wanted her to pull steel. If she did, she could see his pungent friends standing nearby with pig stickers of their own. She could kill them all, it was a certainty. In the blink of an eye, she could fill her hands with Xoactali bronze and send these pale idiots back to their ancestors in so many pieces, but the last thing she needed right now was a pile of corpses at her feet. Not again.

  Of course, Ugly and his friends had no idea what kind of hornet's nest they were kicking when they provoked her. They figured if they pushed her far enough, she would draw a weapon, and they would have all the excuse they needed to poke her full of holes and dump her in an unmarked grave at a crossroads. But she was wise to this clumsy provocation. Had she not weathered the plots and political maneuverings of imperial statesman and generals? This awkward groping for violence was like an overeager suitor impatient for passion from a reluctant virgin, unsubtle and distasteful. But Shaitaan had experience with suitors as well, with their panting, sour breath and their fat fingers. They were all the same, all just as predictable, as easily frustrated, as simple to break. Ugly lacked the imagination to predict what she would do next.

  Shaitaan reached forward with both hands and gripped Ugly by the fat of his hips. His eye went wide and his mouth formed a silent squeal as her fingers dug in. He screamed when she lifted his bulk into the air and walked him three strides to the bar. She pressed his back into the rough-edged wood and twisted her grip, eliciting another wail from him like a baby torn away from a breast. His feet dangled above the floor and kicked like a man drowning.

  Then she opened her mouth into a monstrous snarl. His eye, still level with her lips, saw glittering white teeth capped with gold. The yellow metal transformed her incisors into fangs fit for a wolf, and he gave out a shriek of both pain and fear as the mouth gaped before his face.

  "THOSE WERE MY EGGS!" She roared into his terrified face. She realized she'd shouted at him in Xoactali, but she figured he got the gist of her message. Pain was, of course, the universal language.

  He screamed until his voice broke, until what escaped his throat was nothing more than a hoarse, breathy croak. When she finally released him, he slumped to the floor, rigid with agony, and tipped over until his head rested on the grimy wood floor. There he wept, his arms folded into his chest like a dying insect. As he lay trembling and weeping on the filthy boards, Shaitaan glimpsed the flesh where she'd grabbed him. Angry red welts blossomed where her fingers had dug in, welts that would turn black and then green in the coming days. She'd seen more than enough injuries like this in her life.

  The atmosphere in that smoky inn had changed once again. Where there had once been a silent interest and anticipation hanging in the air, dozens of men eager to see sport at this dark-skinned outlander's expense, now there was a mute uncertainty. Hands hovered near knives, and eyes shifted from her to the exits as nearly forty men realized they had greatly underestimated the foreigner. Shaitaan had elevated herself from plaything to threat, and these folk seemed less than pleased with her promotion.

  Three others stepped forward, dirty men in ragged furs and sweat-stained shirts and matted beards. These were the ones she'd correctly assumed were Ugly's friends. Shaitaan watched them approach, her teeth clenched and bared. She stood still, showing no fear, even if she felt it. Three to one were not great odds on the enemy's ground, not if you had empty hands. But they seemed as uncertain as she about their odds. Worse for them yet, they had made the first move. They'd come to her in a group, hands on their knives. Even if she was a foreigner, she could carve them into pieces now, and she would be justified.

  And what justification do you need? hissed the sword. Must the wolf justify itself to sheep? Does the jaguar apologize to the monkey? The only justice you need is hunger. That's all the justice there is.

  Shaitaan reached a hand back over her shoulder, stopping just a hair's breadth from the grip of her sword. She could feel the warmth of that bronze, even wrapped in rags like it was, causing her palm to itch and her throat to crack with thirst. She ran the tip of her tongue over her teeth, where she could feel the tips of the gold fangs. It would have been so easy, but she wouldn't. She would not move her hand so far as to touch that blade, not under threat of death or dismemberment. But these idiots didn't know that.

  Ugly's friends flinched back as her hand moved, one of them tripping backwards over another patron's legs, and that seemed to break them. They turned their attention to their whimpering friend, who could not yet be convinced to sit up from where he lay. Shaitaan could see around her that her audience was once again settling into their seats, knowing the morning's entertainment had come to an end, and not with the conclusion they all preferred. They all glared at her over their bitter drinks and bland, cold food.

  Cowards, then, to the last man. Pranksters. Little more than rowdy children. Not even real threats. But they'd done their damage. Shaitaan had sold her blanket for a plate of eggs that were now scattered across the floorboards and being shaken out of the clothes and hair of the two women who sat by the door. She would get no more service here, not even if she had the coin.

  She would try to find sustenance elsewhere. Perhaps her fingers would be fast enough to steal one of the greasy-looking hand pies from that sweaty pie vendor down the road. If it didn't make her sick, it might be just enough to keep her going until she figured out what to do next.