He saw her slide a throwing dagger out of a wrist sheath somewhere within her expansive black sleeves. She twirled it a bit, making the blade dance between her fingers before finally grabbing the hilt. If there were a class in intimidation, Albanos mused, she would have received full marks. But he'd have written the textbook, so he remained calm in the face of a rather impressive display. She spoke again as she began to turn.
"I'm going to give you five seconds to leave, by whatever route, before I br--"
Her voice caught in her throat when she had rotated enough to see who she was addressing. The piercing green eyes widened in surprise. The rest of her form became still as the monument behind her.
"Or you'll what?" he goaded. "Attack me? Here? Even you wouldn't dare violate the sanctity of the Grove, I don't imagine. 'No blood must we ever shed here, for those within have already shed enough,' or something along those lines?"
She remained frozen. It was beginning to unnerve him, coming from a girl who had been so animated, rapidly and violently so, the only other time he'd seen her.
"Is something the matter?"
"You're...you."
"Well, I'm glad to hear it. I'd be a bit angry if I suddenly discovered I was someone else after all these years," he joked, but the humor hid a growing uncertainty in his mind. He was used to people recognizing his name once it was given. He was a creature of myth and legend in any land that feared shadowy corners and things that decidedly did not go bump in the night.
He was not used to being recognized on sight before his name could even come up. He'd made a careful point of that. When you were the most wanted man in the world, you wanted the best a witness could manage to be "A strange man in a black cloak with an off-putting sense of humor." That at least only narrowed it down to you, every other assassin and thief in the world, several orders of monks, and a particular breed of perpetually depressed adolescents.
"You...have a LOT of nerve coming here." She practically spat the words at him. "The exile includes the Shadowgrove. Even here, I could cut you down, and they'd be willing to overlook it. Just this once. For old time's sake."
"Ahh, but your argument has two flaws, you see. One, not only am I no longer exiled, but I am also the principal of this Academy now, so attacking me would be ill-advised. And two, perhaps the more fundamental of the errors in your logic, was the assertion that you could cut me down at all."
He flashed her a grin and watched with satisfaction as her pallid skin flushed. She could insult him all day long, but he'd be damned if he was going to be talked down to.
"You lie." She was visibly shaking with rage now, words escaping through a cage of teeth clenched to the verge of shattering. Albanos highly suspected that, were they not standing in a place so sacred, he'd be explaining himself while fending off a vast array of weaponry.
"It's true, though. See, Mr. Hagglit's pulled a runner on you all because he's caught wind of some trouble with the new king—best guess at any rate—and he brought me in to either figure it out or get myself killed. I doubt he cared which."
She considered this for a second before her death grip on her dagger relaxed by the tiniest fraction, a tinge of color returning to her knuckles. Soon after, she began to twirl it again, her eyes never leaving his.
"To be fair, that does sound like something that wretch would do."
"I've even got the stuffy cloak of office sitting in my wardrobe back on campus to prove it, although I'd rather not resort to that. For my sake."
The dagger vanished, clean and clever as a magician's coin, back into its hidden sheathe. The moment of nearly-open hostilities had passed, although both parties would contend that a pecking order remained to be established.
"Alright, Mr. Dire Wolf. Talk. Why are you out here bothering me? If what you say is true, haven't you got erasers to dust?"
"How did you know who I am?"
"Research. We must know our enemies better than our friends because there's a fair chance we'll never have to kill our friends in the night. Probably. If a person knows where to look, there are plenty of sketches of you."
"Enemies?" He chuckled at the thought of being the enemy of thousands of young men and women he'd never met or done a thing to in his life just because some archaic authority figure told them he was. At least the assassins and thieves held no double standards concerning their love of tradition. If anything was true long enough, it became as good as law.
"Well, I know it's a long shot, but I have to ask, would you happen to have a cigarette that an ‘enemy’ could bum off you then? I'm getting desperate. We can even call it a peace offering if you like."
To his surprise, Lillith reached into her cloak and flicked a pristinely rolled tube in his direction. Albanos gave it an experimental sniff out of ages-old paranoia, caught a tinge of an acrid scent, and paused while his mind shuffled through the filing cabinet in his brain labeled "Survival."
"Nice try. Any real ones?"
Lillith grinned and reached into a different pocket, passing over a more ragged hand-roll, which made up for its lack of grace by actually containing tobacco.
"The man knows his cigarettes."
"No, the man knows his poisons. Nausbin, I believe? I'd rather not spend the next several days in the privy, saying goodbye to nearly everything I've ever eaten and several organs. How many people have you gotten with those?"
"Seventeen over the past two years. They never seem to learn. I hate freeloaders, especially stupid ones."
"Well, enemies or not, that's one thing we have in common. So tell me, you seem like a fairly free-thinking individual. Do you take the party-line 'Albanos is evil' story at face value? I only ask because you seem well-versed in it, yet you're the first such person who hasn't immediately tried to kill me in years."
"They’ve certainly led us to believe that you are the enemy of all that is decent and honorable about our profession. But no, I've never been quite convinced of all that. And they won't talk about it, which means there's something to hide. I know you're worth a lot of money, and maybe that was enough for me."
"Certainly no delusions about why you do what you do, then."
The girl gave him a half-shrug.
"If I'm not a man the Academies like to talk about, blanket death warrants aside, I can't imagine they made it easy on you, learning about me."
"Full name, Albanos Fredoran K'hras. You were born on an undetermined date in 981 as the illegitimate child of a wealthy merchant and one of his maids. The merchant disavowed all knowledge of you and your mother and used his influence to have her run out of town. You grew up in a small port village where, as you would later insufferably tell anyone who would listen, your mother tried to instill in you the sense of justice and honor your father did not have."
"How did you--"
"Your mother passed away of a sudden illness in 997," she pressed on, ignoring his interruption. “Through the references of some of the shadier dock workers, you came to the Kelsai Academy that same year with nowhere else to go and no outside connections to distract you. You graduated top of your class four years later, setting new records in every aspect of Academy life and finishing three-quarters of the thief-level coursework along with your assassin training. You would have double-majored, but the thieves complained.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
"You became the youngest assassin in history to reach the one million gold club for bounties collected, including your biggest mark, a wealthy but unscrupulous robber baron whom you would later discover was, in fact, your father. Enraged that you never got the chance to interrogate him painfully -- which was even your stated goal on your Academy application -- you turned away from the usual assassin method of no-questions-asked contract kills and began insisting that your clients not only tell you who and how much, but why that person needed to die."
"There's no way you can--"
"In 1015, you were exiled and stricken from the registries for reasons I must admit even I have been unable to discern. The Council buried your skeletons deep, Wolf boy, but I have my theories. Since then, you've become a vigilante, working as the 'people's assassin,' performing jobs for even the poorest of oppressed farmers for nothing more than a home-cooked meal and a place to stay for the night.
"I can only assume this is how you have evaded capture for so long since the friendship of someone with your particular skills is more valuable to a peasant than a sack full of coin for someone else to kill them over. And now, in 1030, I can add 'Was made principal of the Kelsai Academy and placed back on the registries' to your list of deeds.”
Albanos blinked. He kept blinking for nearly a minute while processing everything he had heard. In the labyrinthine sprawl of concussions and repressed memories that constituted his mind, she had offered him up pieces of his past that even he had forgotten.
Lillith smirked in satisfaction and waited.
"You can't know all of that," was all he could finally manage. "The Academies don't even know all of that."
"You said it yourself. The Academies are not the best source of information where you are concerned, so I resorted to other methods. Non-violent methods, I assure you."
Lillith hastily added the last bit after Albanos began visibly drawing himself up, fury kindling in his eyes, thinking of all the innocent people he'd interacted with throughout the years and all the exciting ways assassins could come up with to extract information from such people. She still wasn't sure if this would come to blows, and if it did, she wanted to face a confused, off-balance Albanos. Not an angry one. Never, ever an angry one.
"So how then?" he asked, subsiding a bit. "Bearing in mind that as your superior, only I am allowed to be annoyingly cryptic now."
She gave another dismissive shrug, disappointingly unresponsive to his witty repartee.
"No offense, but you're old and set in your ways. You're a creature of habit and more predictable than an assassin should be. I tracked reported sightings, compared them to previous years in the library's record books, and saw that you could almost set clocks by your travel schedule around the continent. Then, during my time off for the summer, I set off after you. I timed it so that I was always one step behind you, conducting completely harmless interviews with the ordinary people who know you best while memories of you were still fresh in their minds.
"It seems, Mr. K'hras, that you have a penchant for telling stories. You enjoy a good audience in a pub, maybe out of the loneliness of the road or because you just love being the center of attention, which seems an unfortunate trait for people like us to have, but to each their own. They knew all about you—your whole life story. You'd handed it out, one puzzle piece at a time, while deep in your cups. And these good people were perfectly willing to share tales of their unsung folk hero with a sweet young lady, especially after a few rounds at the bar. Once I got the same stories over and over again, town after town, I assumed it was either the truth or the one you were sticking to."
Albanos finished off the worthwhile part of his cigarette, licked his fingers, and pinched out the end, tucking the butt away behind his ear to keep from littering. Turning his attention back to the girl, he saw her staring at him, defiance dripping off her as she waited for his reaction. He'd inadvertently let her get him once, with the life story bit. It wouldn't happen again.
"Am I supposed to be impressed? Should I give you some extra credit on your first homework assignment? Should I let you write a 'How I Spent My Summer Vacation' essay and post it on the bulletin board in the main hall?"
Her gaze didn't waiver. "Admit it. It bothers you that you might not be as invisible as you'd like to believe you are."
"Had you shown up in whatever cave or barn I was sleeping in that night and informed me that you knew who I was and didn't have any trouble finding me in the brief interlude before we set about trying to kill one another? Perhaps. But those days have ended, and you can't touch me, so all that research means now is that if I ever want to sit down and write my memoirs, I'll have you to help me fill in the details.
"And is that what this is all about, and why you're being so forthcoming with all of this? Just to prove to me that I'm not as careful as I need to be or that you could have found me anytime you wanted? Good for you. Lecture received. Still, it seems like an awful lot of trouble to go through for such a hollow victory."
The red in her cheeks was beginning to shift down into darker, angrier shades now. She might be untouchable in the physical aspects of her job, but her emotions were still far too close to the surface, and a skilled opponent—or, in this case, an insufferable smart-ass—could use that to their advantage.
"Maybe I felt that the amount of effort and attention my 'enemies' warranted should be proportional to how much fun it would be when I killed them."
Albanos plastered on the best ingratiating smile he could. "Why, I think that was almost flattery in your morbid way. Maybe you don't think I'm an enemy at all! Maybe you've just got a thing for me, and that's why you've been following me around like a little lost puppy dog."
He fluttered his eyelashes to add insult to injury. The throwing dagger was back in her hands a second later, and she got so far as rearing back to throw it before she stopped and simply flung it into the ground at his feet instead.
"This is a test, isn't it?"
"Isn't everything?"
"You want to see how far you can push me before I break so you can prove to yourself in your little world that you're better, more patient, or more disciplined than I am, aren't you?"
"Maybe I just enjoy pissing people off."
Lillith growled, collected her dagger, and began to storm off through the trees.
"One last thing before you leave in a huff," Albanos called after her. She didn't stop, but she slowed a bit. "In the courtyard, when you were unleashing all the hells at once on those boys. Where did you learn to fight like that?"
"What does it matter to you?"
"Well, it's more of a curiosity, really, since I used to fight like that—that exact style, in fact. And seeing as I more or less invented it, minus that bit of eyes-closed grandstanding, I was confused about how you came across it. I know they're too proud to teach anything of my creation here, and I've never taught it to anyone myself. Which leaves me with a bit of a mystery.”
At this, she stopped and began twirling the dagger again in what Albanos was coming to recognize as a prideful gesture.
"Mr. K'hras...sometimes we are forced to accept something as an inevitable part of our lives, some event that we cannot escape looming somewhere in our future. And if it cannot be avoided, we must instead go to great lengths to ensure that, when the time comes, we can at least make it something to be remembered by. And that's all the answer you'll get out of me right now.
"Perhaps, in the future, you should learn to ask all your questions before pissing off the only person who can give you your answers."
With that, she walked on, quickly becoming indistinguishable from the deepening shadows beneath the massive trees to either side.
"Right. Nice meeting you," he muttered after she had gone, speaking to no one in particular.
Intimidating and nearly incapable of giving a straight answer. She was a creature after his own heart. She might even make an exceptional assassin once she learned that none of them were as important in the grand scheme of things as they would like to think. He could help with the humility part. He was good at humility, as long as it was happening to someone else.
Albanos found himself grinning, but the joy quickly drained away when he remembered where he was and what he felt obligated to do while he was there. Getting his bearings from the angle of sunlight coming into the clearing, he set off for the western edge of the Grove.