The Damsel and the Daggerman

As a little girl, she’d been a voracious reader and daydreamer. But she’d never guessed what would happen at age eighteen when she enrolled in a cultural anthropology course, much against her parents’ wishes. On the first day, she’d fallen in love—with Egypt and the dashing young professor. After she had seduced Liam with her body and her brain, he had seduced her with the wide, wild world beyond academia. He never would have thought to study something as geographically available as caravans in Sangland. And yet Jacinda was fascinated by the people here, curious about all their histories.



But the enigma came first. And the enigma in question was watching her walk toward him as if trying to decide whether to run away or swallow her whole.



The daggerman’s posture was almost smug, the curve of his back suggesting a sleek jungle cat, asleep with one eye open. His dark hair was pulled back today, except for the bits that fluttered around his face. A beard shaded his cheeks and dusted his upper lip, enhancing the cut of his jaw. At first, Jacinda thought he used kohl on his eyes as the Bludmen did, but as she stepped closer and stopped about ten feet away, she thought it must be dark eyelashes. But then—no, it was both, the bastard. He blinked, long and slow, his arm never stopping as it flicked knives lazily at a spinning target. A human shape was painted over the red and white bull’s-eye, which spun with the nearly silent ticking she’d come to associate with Mr. Murdoch’s clockwork machinery.



“See something you like?” he asked.



“The surface isn’t what intrigues me, Mr. Taresque. It’s the truth I’m looking for.”



He chuckled and flicked his eyes at the bull’s-eye. Faster than Jacinda could follow, a knife thunked into the target, right in the middle of the outlined figure. Right where its heart would be.



“The truth. You want the truth?” She nodded, and he jerked his chin toward the knife sunk in the wood. “Some things are better left buried, don’t you think?”



Jacinda knew well enough when someone was trying to scare her. With a toss of her hair, she marched to the target, her boots crunching over the broken blades of grass. Wrapping both of her gloved hands around the knife’s handle, she managed to tug it out as neatly as possible, considering the blasted thing was rotating slowly with the wood. She held it up, testing its weight, her fingers carefully pinching the leaf-shaped blade.



Marco grinned at her, hands on his hips. “Don’t cut yourself, sweetness.”



Jacinda snorted, raised her arm, and let the knife fly in a black and silver blur to quiver in the ground a few inches from Marco’s boot. He didn’t move. “Even I know throwing knives aren’t sharp, Mr. Taresque.”



His grin widened in appreciation and surprise, and Jacinda’s cheeks flushed with sudden heat. “The tips are sharp enough. If you threw with any spirit, you could strike me down from there.”



Tension rose as they considered each other. Jacinda felt rooted to the earth and yet as if she might fly free at any moment. His violet eyes went a shade darker, which didn’t seem possible. Finally, Jacinda winked, knowing he would go on staring forever, trying to impose his will on her. Let him try. She knew his type well enough. She walked to him, then yanked the knife from the dirt and wiped it on the folds of her brown skirt. Holding it out, she risked looking at his face again, suspecting he would think the dimple in her cheek silly and frivolous. Not that she cared.



“You say I could strike you down, and yet you didn’t budge.”



He chuckled. “I never budge.”



“And I do everything with spirit. I want an interview.”



“I don’t.” He took the knife from her glove, his kid-swathed fingertips dragging over the crease of her palm—the love line, as an old gypsy woman had once told her. Jacinda shivered in spite of herself.



Her palm burning, she pulled out her notebook and pen. “I have influence. The truth could exonerate you. Surely you’d like the world to know you’re innocent?”



Marco stepped closer as he slipped the knife back into a loop on his vest with a whisper of metal on cloth, a strangely intimate sound. From far away, he’d seemed a normal-sized man, but up close, the tips of his blades winking inches away from her body, he seemed large and solid and made of rocks and vines and wildness barely held together by his indigo waistcoat.



“What do I care about the world so long as I know the truth myself?” he said, barely loudly enough for her to hear. It seemed impossible, that his voice could be nothing more than a breath, a warm breeze on her jaw.



She swallowed hard. “You would have freedom. Your good name.”



His glove cupped her cheek, his thumb stroking hot over her jaw as she struggled to hold still. “I always have freedom. I don’t need a good name to know who I am. You, on the other hand . . .”



He released her, but she was frozen in place, chin up where he’d last held it. He walked around her, a few simple steps, but it was as if the polarity of the planet reversed and she was suddenly the moon, something cold and foreign and powerful in itself. Something caught in uncontrollable orbit.



“I know who I am, thank you very much.”



“But you’re not free.”



She shook her head, her mouth open in surprise. “Really?”



His eyes were oddly soulful, gazing into hers, belying a peculiar sort of sorrow she didn’t care to contemplate. “You think you’re free. But something holds you back.”



“Do not toy with me, Mr. Taresque. I’m a widow, not one of those giddy girls by the fire, mooning at you. I know what you are.”



“You think I did it, then?” His voice changed as his teeth clenched, and he circled away from her, their connection broken. He pulled the knives from the target one by one, so quickly and roughly that even though she knew there was no danger, she expected to see blood. Jacinda could feel that she was losing him, would have to reel him back in with sure hands.



“I think you’re hiding something. And I want you to tell me what it is. And why.”



He spun, and his fine eyes narrowed at her, taking in her figure, her face. If those attributes would weigh in her favor, she would use them, and gladly. She let one corner of her mouth play up, slow and sly, her eyelashes lowering just a little, just enough.



But instead of softening, he stiffened, cocking his head. “Is this a game to you?”



“A game?”



“Are you as brash as you pretend to be? Or is it part of your little act?”



“My act?”



He grinned. “You’re echoing, sweetness. Might want to work on that.”



Jacinda took a deep breath, trying to focus. He unnerved her, as much as she hated to admit it. “I’m not scared of you, Mr. Taresque. The truth is not a game. And I wouldn’t say I’m brash. Simply that I don’t base my decisions on fear.”



That earned her a wide, toothy smile that made her nervous. And rightly so, considering what happened next. “So prove it.”



And he reached into his vest and held out a playing card.



.5.



Jacinda took the card from between his fingers, careful not to touch his black suede glove.



“The Queen of Hearts? Really?”



“Really.”



She held it up to the light. It was an old card, the image in sepia-tinged tones that might very well have been painted by hand. “There’s a knife slash in this card.”



“Let’s add another one.”



Her body stiffened before her mind caught up. “Exactly what are you proposing, Mr. Taresque?”



“A dare.”



She rolled her eyes. “Elucidate.”



He chuckled. “Let’s make it simple. I strap you to the target. You hold this card out, as close to or as far from your body as you wish. I’ll throw one knife. If I hit the card, you go back to wherever you came from and leave me the hell alone. If I miss . . .”



“Yes?”



“Well, if I kill you, I suppose I’m on the run again.”



She shivered but swatted him with her notebook to cover the true frisson of fear. “If you miss?”



“I’ll answer one question with complete honesty.”



“Only one?”



That grin again. “I have fifty-one more cards, if you find you like the game. Should be enough for your book.”



Jacinda turned the card over in her hands. One knife-wide slice through it. Not a drop of blood, as carefully as she looked, and the paper was old and unwaxed, so she would have noticed. Her eyes flicked to the target, where a single gash of knife-struck wood marred the black-painted figure from his throw just moments ago. The bull’s-eye still spun lazily, a constellation of scars outlining a body she could almost imagine as her own, if naked and corseted, the legs delicately spread and the arms up in what almost seemed triumph. Or surrender.



She shook her head. That was ridiculous.



“What if I walk away right now?”



“Then you’ll never know the truth.”



She walked past him in a huff, the card held in one hand, the edges of the paper cutting into her fingers.



“But I don’t think you’re going to walk away, sweetness.”



And that’s when she stopped.



“Consider it carefully. This is your last chance.”



His voice was mocking, taunting, luring. And beneath all the posturing, the cruelty, the danger, there was something else. Pleading? So low, so deep, that even he surely didn’t know it was there.



Could it be possible that he wanted to tell her the truth as much as she wanted to hear it? Even if it was a confession of guilt? But surely if Lady Letitia had seen her dying in a pool of blood in the carnival, she wouldn’t have allowed Jacinda to stay. That had to mean it was safe.



She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, her ribs creaking against her corset as she focused her will. With a cold, slow smile, she held out the playing card between two fingers. “Then let’s play, Mr. Taresque.”



“That’s the second part of the deal. First, you have to call me Marco.”