Django Wexler - The Shadow Throne

“She’s still my daughter,” Sal said. “An’ he shouldn’t have put his grubby hands all over her.”

“I’m hardly an expert on daughters,” Jane said. “But did you ever think this is what she wants? Getting a rise out of you? Remember what happened with Tim the Lad? Or Steve Shake Eye? Or that Hamveltai sailor you chased off?”

Sal’s face twisted. That had touched a sore point, obviously, and he fell back on good old-fashioned rage. “Get out, you stupid bitch! Take your big mouth out of my house before I break your pretty face for you!”

“Not until you promise me you’re not going to run off and try to carve up poor George.”

“I know who I’m going to carve up!”

Sal reached across the table and wrapped his hand around the handle of the carving knife. Before he could jerk it out of the wood, Jane did her knife trick again, blade flashing into her hand as though she had summoned it into being. In the same motion she reached out, lazily, and laid the edge of the blade against the apple of Sal’s throat. Sal froze.

“I would think real fucking hard before you do that,” Jane said. Her eyes moved. “And you, Junior, I would think even harder.”

The older boy had been edging toward the confrontation. He paused, and Winter passed unnoticed behind him. There was a heavy iron poker by the stairs, and she edged in that direction, ready to grab it if Jane lost control of the situation. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw the younger boy fumbling with something-there was a click , menacingly familiar-

Winter reacted instinctively. She grabbed the poker in one hand, spun, and swung it around into the barrel of the pistol the kid had just cocked. He pulled the trigger just before the metallic clang of the impact, and she saw the flash of the powder in the pan, followed by the shatteringly loud report of the gun going off. By that time, her blow had knocked it well away from its intended target, and the ball pocked into a wall, throwing off splinters.

Sal was so surprised he let go of the knife and bulled forward, and Jane had to retreat hastily to keep him from cutting his own throat. He whirled to face the stairs, where the younger boy was cowering and clutching his stinging hand.

“Jim!” he roared. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

“She was going to hurt you, Da!” Jim screeched. “She had a knife, and-”

“I am going to give you such a fucking thrash-”

Sal took a couple of steps toward the stairs and his cowering son, then stopped, because Jane had grabbed his arm from behind. He started to turn but halted when he felt the prick of her knife between his shoulder blades.

“You’re more of a fucking moron than I thought, Sal,” said Jane. “Were you planning to bring that thing to George’s?”

Sal had the grace to looked embarrassed. “George has got three sons. They might’ve been armed.”

“And if they had been? You’d have killed one of ’em? What for?”

“I just thought-”

“Thinking is the last thing you were doing. Now, you listen to me, Salmon Bellows. I have had enough of this, do you hear? When Iffie comes back-and she will come back, once she figures out you’re not going to pick a fight with George-I want you to have a nice long talk with her. A talk . If I hear that she’s walking around with bruises, I’m going to come back, and you and me will have a talk. You understand?” She nodded at the boy on the stairs. “That goes for him, too. It’s your own damned fault for leaving a loaded pistol lying about. You get all that?”

“I-” Sal began, but Jane did something to his arm, and he moaned. “I get it. I get it!”

“Good.” Jane backed off a step and made the knife disappear again. “Hell, tell Iffie that if she really likes George so much, she ought to marry him. That ought to bring her running back right away.”

Sal, to Winter’s amazement, laughed and shook his head. His sons laughed with him, timidly, and at this reminder he turned on them with another roar.

“And as for you , Jim, I’m-”

Jane cleared her throat pointedly, and Sal paused.

“I’m going to have a talk with you,” he finished. “A long talk. Now go to your room and stay there.”

Jane took her leave, and Winter followed her back out into the alley. They said nothing until they’d gone round a bend and out of sight of the little shack. Jane sighed and rubbed her temples.

“Goddamn that kid. Scared the piss out of me.” She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, took a deep breath, then looked up at Winter. “Are you all right?”

Winter flexed her hand, which still tingled from the transmitted impact of the poker. “Nothing serious. I’ll be fine.”

“Fucking kid. Could have killed someone.”

“I think he wanted to kill you , actually.”

Jane chuckled. “I gathered that. Nice swing with the poker, by the way. Have I thanked you yet?”

“Not as such.”

“Thanks.” Jane ran a hand through her hair, mussing it further. “Sorry. It’s not every day a kid a head shorter than me tries to fucking shoot me in the back.”

“You could have fooled me,” Winter said, honestly. “I figured this was all in a day’s work for Mad Jane.”

“Don’t you start,” Jane muttered. “It’s bad enough that Sal and the rest started calling me that.” Catching Winter’s smirk, she changed the subject. “What about you, anyway? What happened to the girl who was too afraid to throw a bucket of shit at Mary Ellen Todd? Did you take lessons in swinging a poker?”

“Not. . exactly,” Winter said.

“You said it was a long story.”

“It is.”

“Well,” Jane said, “we’ve got a ways to go yet.”

By the time they made it back to Jane’s building, late in the afternoon, Winter had gone through most of the last three years. It had been a halting narrative, punctuated by Jane’s conversations with various merchants, fishwives, and other Dockside inhabitants along her route. A few times she’d had to stop while Jane was called on to solve some minor issue, such as one house’s tendency to lean onto another’s property and what that should mean for rents, or the matter of some rancid fish that somehow got packed into a shipment. Each time, the participants seemed to look to Jane for judgment as a matter of course, and accepted her ruling with more grace than Sal had done.

These gaps helped Winter keep her story straight. She told the truth, more or less, but left her personal involvement in events deliberately vague, and omitted any mention of Feor, Bobby’s healing, or that last awful night in the temple under the Great Desol. After a short internal struggle, she also decided to say nothing about what Janus had sent her to do. I still need to figure that out myself. I can always fill Jane in later.

Jane listened, her eyes going wider and wider, until by the end of the trip she was ignoring the friendly greetings that met her at every corner to concentrate entirely on Winter. When they stopped outside the barred gate of her building, she stopped and glared.

“You’re serious about this, aren’t you?” Jane said. “You ran away from Mrs. Wilmore’s and joined the army , like some girl out of a ballad?”

Winter nodded.

“And then you served in fucking Khandar with Vhalnich ?”

“I didn’t mean to,” Winter said. “I went to Khandar because I thought it would be a good place to hide. It’s not my fault they decided to have a revolution right after I got there.”

“You really did it,” Jane said. “I do not fucking believe it!”