Assassin's Blade

The End of The World

Fia's target was in sight. She crouched behind a potted lemon tree in the piazza, a slip of a girl in an olive-green tunic and hose and boots, clutching her bow. Fia crooked her fingers at Neva to summon her over, her dark eyes never leaving the target.

Neva joined her, her blonde hair long and swinging loose around her face. Fia's dark brown hair was bound up, though not in the style of a married woman. Never that.

Neva rested her chin on Fia's shoulder, looking toward the target. "You better not do it," she whispered. "If you shoot him, the retaliation will never end. He will send his sultans and guards after you. They'll pursue you beyond the sunset to the gates of hell."

Fia plucked an arrow from her quiver. "I can outrun them. They can't kill what they can't catch."

Her target sat with his friends playing dice, a Persian form of the game from the old country, speaking in Syriac to his fellow countrymen and several Fiorenza friends.

The piazza was bustling with many people under the bright morning sun: some shopping, some visiting on their way to the well. The markets ran along the side of the monastery gardens, where breads, fruits and vegetables, and cheese were being sold, and the fragrance of bread and lemons and wood smoke hung over the piazza. Fia's target was sharing bread with his friends, still warm from the communal stone oven that had cooked it. He tore off a piece and lifted it in his fingers as he talked to his friends. There it stayed, aloft, as he continued talking.

Perfect. Fia drew the bow, her face pressed against the string as she took deadly aim.

"Fia, don't!" Neva whispered.

The bowstring sang, and the arrow flew to its mark – straight through the piece of bread, carrying it away.

"Aiee!" Her grandfather dropped what was left of his bread and he squinted at Fia.

Then he roared with laughter. "Child! That was my breakfast!"

The people he'd been speaking with were not amused. "Are you trying to put somebody's eye out?" one of his astonished friends said.

"Or get somebody killed?" another added.

Fia stood up from behind the lemon tree. "They're blunted arrows." Fia pulled out an arrow to show them. A little piece of leather was tied to the business end of the arrow. "And my aim is good. I wasn't going to hit any of you."

"Little girls shouldn't play with bows and arrows," one of the Fiorenza men said sanctimoniously.

"Little?" Fia said scornfully, hands on hips. "We're twelve years old. We're not little."

"And little girls shouldn't wear their hair in that heathen style, and they shouldn't be talking back to their elders," the man added.

Grandfather tore off another piece of bread. "I am what you would call a heathen," he said mildly through his pepper-and-salt beard. "And in my home country, we allow women to shoot bows and arrows, and hold public office, and write books, and choose who they want to marry. If Fia were my grandson, you would be praising his aim and saying, 'Boys will be boys!'"

Grandfather's friend grumbled, eyeing Fia darkly. "All the same, this city-state is under the sway of the Pope. The holy Church in her wisdom says no to all those things."

"Your faith is cousin to my faith," Grandfather said. "I prefer my faith, for we treat our women as citizens, not chattel."

"And the girls can be assassins," Fia said to Neva, just loud enough for the other man to hear.