CHAPTER 451: 451: THE HOODS WITH NO NAME

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The seam did not open. It breathed once under Mia’s palm and went still again, a lie made of air and heat.

The second breath never came.

Something black and wrong dropped out of the rim above her like a hole learning how to fall. It had the jaw of a cat and the patience of a knife. The lacquered mask hit where a throat would be if she had been slow. She wasn’t. Her chin tucked, her shoulder rose, and the jaw met plate with a hard, toothy clack. Sparks. The smell of camphor and old meat.

"Down!" Serit barked, already moving.

Two more shadows slid in from the left and right, quiet as the thought you didn’t tell anyone because you might have to do it. A fourth came straight because that was the only line that let his hands do what they were trained to do: break a knee in one motion and a story in two.

Seven-star killers, all of them. You could feel it in the way the air made the room cold.

Mia’s spear came up from her belt on a line her body had practiced since it was small enough to be laughed at for trying. She took the mask under the hinge and drove the butt back at the same time, heel finding a shin she hadn’t looked at. The cat-mouth scraped and slid. The shin went the wrong way. Someone hissed, swallowed the sound, and made it smaller on purpose.

Iron-dust netting whispered through the dawn. Serit cut one strand and then three with a knife he kept duller than wisdom so it would tear, not slice; torn nets misbehave. Om swung his lens like a hammer and cracked a wrist that didn’t expect glass to be heavy. Kiva’s elbow found a throat. Two of Mia’s twenty went down before they finished their first curses. One didn’t speak again.

The cat-mask came back twice as clever. Its pads struck her collarbone and slid; hooks beneath the lacquer bit silk and skin. Mia rolled with it and used the roll to put the mask where her dagger point wanted it. The point kissed paint and went through. The assassin let the mask go instead of letting his head get nailed to his death. Smart.

He flowed away, face ordinary and forgettable, which is how you stay alive in a trade that needs you to be no one worth remembering.

The second wave hit. You could tell it was second because the first had been for fear and the second was for work. Seven-stars do not shout. They arrived where they had decided to be in the night and made their small adjustments while other people bled.

Bone pins popped under someone’s boot. A runner screamed and dropped to a knee, then another as the second pin found flesh and taught it not to trust itself. The scream cut short like a rope. Kiva dragged him backward and swore without moving her lips. A cord went for Mia’s ankle — iron-salted, meant to blind and burn as much as bind. She jumped. Not far. Not pretty. Enough.

"Form UP!" she said, voice flat, breath square. "Half-moon. Shield inside, spears out."

They were good. They did it. It still wasn’t enough. Seven-stars do not care if you are good. They care if you make mistakes, and if you won’t, they make you.

A loop of thorn-wire flicked under the spears and snagged a boot. The half-moon stuttered. The cat-mask came again from the blind side where a body always forgets there is room. It wasn’t a cat. It didn’t need to be. It needed to leave cat beast truths behind: curved claw tracks, a jaw that took at an angle, a spray that looked like a lunge and not like a cut.

Mia parried twice, then once, then not at all because there was no parry that worked. The curved blade found the seam under her arm where plates do not meet right and took exactly the meat it wanted—a mouthful, no more. White flash, then red wave. Her left hand went cold, then hot.

"Princess!" Om snapped.

"I am not weak," she said, because talking makes other people remember you are still here. She shifted grip and shoved the spear through a wrist that was too clean to be a cat’s. Bone cracked. The assassin let the hand go to save the arm. Smart again. It bought her a breath. Sometimes a breath is a year.

Two of hers fell, quiet and competent about it because that is what good soldiers do when dying will not change the count.

A shape broke the rim.

"Of course you would pick the worst place in the world to die," Thea said, coming down the slope like someone the slope had invited.

She did not smile. She mocked anyway; it was how she kept her jaw from clenching hard enough to crack itself. Her fifty poured after her on the angles she’d set before dawn: high dust-net strung low, low trip-salt dragged high, talc pockets ready to turn eyes into liars.

The first assassin to meet her found out why Thea’s training hall had a wall with gouges in it where her name lived without lacquer. Her short sword moved like she had already counted the bones she needed and was embarrassed by how easy they were to find. Throat, hip, shoulder. Every thrust is a subtraction. The old woman second came out of the curtain of dust on the other side and cut a tendon with a knife so small you would have mocked it if you had not loved your legs.

"Who brings lacquer to a forest?" Thea said, contempt sharp as vinegar, as she hooked the fallen cat-mask with a foot and kicked it toward the trees. The assassin who had been wearing it went exactly where men go when the thing that lets them be brave isn’t on their face anymore — sideways, into someone else’s shadow, hoping they had not been seen.

They had been seen.

The seven-stars adjusted. Of course they did. Professionals do not make speeches. They do arithmetic. Fifty against seven, plus twenty, minus seven already spent on other math this morning. Only Mia and Thea were seven stars. The rest were four, five, and six.

The half-ring of Thea’s line tightened, then flexed on purpose to let three assassins in too far so they could be touched by the low net. Iron dust kissed lacquer and turned the breath inside it to mud. Two went down coughing. One cut the net, coughed blood, and kept working. Seven-stars have ugly lungs and they do not give them up while they still have fingers.

A hiss went around the basin’s rim in a language that did not use the mouth. The assassins shifted their shape. They stopped trying to finish Mia and started trying to peel her away. They made pain and used it for shepherding. A spear meant for Om’s ribs looked like a mistake and was not; it drove him where a bone pin waited. His leg went stupid. He toppled. Serit caught him by the harness and dragged him on one knee like a man pulling a sled, face blank because faces waste heat.

Mia took the next cut low on the thigh and turned it into a half-stumble that put her exactly where Thea’s shadow wanted her. Thea slid a wrap around her, fast, sure, angry only with the blood, not with the person it belonged to.

"You smell like trouble," Thea said, which in her mouth meant I am so relieved I could hit you.

"What are you doing here? Why did you follow me? You smell like old books," Mia said, which in her mouth meant "Thank you."

"You brought twenty," Thea said. "You are going to bring ten home."

"Better than none," Mia said, and did not look at the faces that would be stays of memory now and not mouths.

The assassins pressed. Thea’s fifty bent. Three went down in a blink — one to a hook under the jaw that took the voice with it, two to the kind of throat-pinch you can teach but not learn unless you are willing to live with the thing you now know you can do. The old woman second got one back with a throw so short and mean it did not look like a throw at all. Another came for her and she elbowed his ear. Nothing special about an elbow. Everything special about where and when it landed. He forgot what his feet were for.

The leader did not look at him. Leaders who live long in this work do not count in ways that make them bleed in the wrong place. He ticked a claw against the bead behind his jaw and felt the princess’s scent burn steady. He felt something else too — a long, slow hum that did not belong to the forest. He filed it where it could be used later. Men like him are repositories of the world’s unfairness. They make withdrawals when paid.

"Break them," he said, voice flat. "No flags. No names. Cat beasts work."