Page 16 of Bargaining with the Devil

“Then you’ll know why I’m particular about the care of these.” He looked back down to the work of his hands.

She watched him in silence, sipping her drink, as he sharpened the knife. “How did you come to it?” she asked eventually.

“My work, do you mean?”

“Yes.” Her bare feet were chilled. She drew them in to tuck beneath the edge of her night rail, resting her tumbler on one updrawn knee.

His face was angled towards his knife, his movements smooth and precise as he ran the blade carefully along the stone. “’Twas no one thing led me to it. I didn’t go looking for it.”

“You were in the Rifles first? You must have been young when you served.”

“Aye. Ran away when I was twelve to join up when they were in Dublin recruiting. ’Twas just a short time before things heated up on the Peninsula.”

“I didn’t know the army accepted men so young.” Not even a young man; at twelve, he’d been a boy yet.

He smiled. “They don’t, generally. I lied about my age. Needed to get away from home. And I was willing to do whatever they asked of me if it meant they’d take me.”

Which probably was the start of the path from there to what he did now. “Why did you need to leave home?”

He made a few more passes of the blade before answering. “When Mam was young yet, the man who fathered me got her in a difficult way, as they say—that’s myself, the difficulty—and that was that. She didn’t matter to him. He was married anyhow, turns out. Has legitimate sons too because he’s fuckin’ Irish minor nobility. Even if he’d wanted to marry Mam, he couldn’t have. But I don’t think he would have anyway.”

“You know who he is?”

“Aye. I know who he is.” He kept his eyes on his hands. “Mam married Dónall Ó Cuinn when I wasn’t quite two. ’Twas still herself that raised me, mostly, but he gave me his name. ’Twas more obligation to Mam than care of me, mind. But he loved her well enough. And my sisters who came along after.”

So Quinn was his surname. Or rather, his mother’s husband’s name, anglicized. Not quite his. “What is your given name?”

He gently laid the grindstone down and slanted the knife towards the oil lamp, tilting the blade first to one side, then the other. “No one’s called me it in a long time, except when my sisters Aoife and Gráinne write me. Not that I get their letters regular, moving around so much.” He pushed hair off his temple with one hand, glancing at her. “’Tis Kieran. Ciarán, properly, in Gaeilge.”

What lay between the point in time when twelve-year-old Ciarán Ó Cuinn joined the Rifles in Dublin and this moment, where Quinn, quietly deadly, sharpened his blades in her cottage in Scotland? There was a far larger stretch of time between those points than what had brought her from London to here, and her own story was plenty knotted in those few years.

He picked up a short leather strap with metal fastenings on one end, hooking it on the topmost chair rail. “I’m the very image of him. The shitehawk who fathered me, that is. It came in stronger, that resemblance, the older I got. Mam loved me regardless, but it got harder for Dónall, looking at me across her kitchen table. Seemed to me by twelve, ’twas better for everyone if I left.” He leaned back slightly, stretching the strap taut, and began passing the blade along it, spine nearly flat to the leather. The muscles over his ribs and in his arms shifted with each careful pass of the knife.

Not that she was watching his musculature. “What does that strap do?”

His lips turned up slightly but he kept his eyes on his work. “Thinking about taking up the trade yourself then? The stone hones the edge, but this strop takes off the burr the stone leaves on it. Cleans up what the stone misses, you might say. Makes the cutting edge the thinnest it can be. Sharpest, that way.” He paused with the blade and looked directly at her again. “Takes almost no pressure at all to bite deep enough if your knife is well tended.”

A shiver worked up her spine, but she held his eyes. “What’s it like?”

Faint surprise creased his brow before he looked down again. “Taking a man’s life?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll not diagram it out for you if ’tis that you’re asking. Won’t help your sleep to have that picture in your mind.”

“Nathaniel told me about Compton.” She wanted to recall the impulsive words as soon as they were out. She hadn’t meant to bring that up; she hadn’t chosen to say that name aloud in years, not even the day Nathaniel told her about Compton’s death. It was the whisky loosening her tongue. She didn’t drink it around anyone, generally.

But she’d said it now, Compton’s name. “In detail,” she elaborated. “About his death.” Once. They’d only spoken of it that one time, a couple of months after Nathaniel turned up on Isobel’s and her doorstep.

“Well, that death’s an exception, I’d say. ’Tis mayhap good to have that particular one in your mind. Did Blackmore tell you I was there that day?”

The revelation startled her. “No.”

“No reason to, I guess. ’Twasn’t too many days after I saw you and your sister situated—starting out for here, the pair of you were.” Steadily, rhythmically, Quinn worked the blade back and forth along the strop. The slow passes of the knife were rather hypnotizing. “I got called back in when Blackmore traced Compton to London. It mightn’t have ended how it did if I’d made it up that alley faster, but I was slowed down. A couple of Compton’s hired men thought to stop us. Blackmore took off running after Compton while I dealt with them. Compton ended it just after I turned the corner.”

He’d used Nathaniel’s blade to do it—Compton had. Nathaniel kept his knives very sharp too. Or had, back then. He never spoke of that work to her other than the once to tell her about Compton. Probably he talked to Isobel about it. Isobel had known more of that side of him than she ever had; it was behind him by the time he showed up in Kirkcudbrightshire.

It wasn’t behind Quinn though. Which was why he had no fewer than six weapons laid out on her table at the moment.