The Dame

by R. A. Salvatore

  Bransen leaped over him in a crouch, left hand extended against Merwal Yahna’s face, lining up a surely fatal blow from his cocked, right arm.

  And a blow did fall, a hard one, but it fell against Bransen before he could finish Merwal Yahna. Affwin Wi’s kick staggered him to the side, and he had to fall over into a roll and then come back to his feet, spinning to face this newest opponent.

  “You murdered Jameston!” he accused.

  “He attacked those sent to make certain he had left.”

  “No!” Bransen retorted. “Never! Not unless he were forced to defend himself!”

  Affwin Wi settled back easily and began to laugh. “Foolish young man,” she said.

  “I came here as a fellow traveler in the way of Jhesta Tu!” Bransen shouted, and Affwin Wi laughed louder.

  “I am not Jhesta Tu!” she shouted back, and the words hit Bransen much harder than her kick ever could have. “Hou-lei!”

  Hou-lei? The title rolled around Bransen’s head for few moments until he connected it to his reading of the Book of Jhest. Hou-lei, the tradition that had inspired Jhesta Tu, an old mercenary warrior class, a tradition of divorcing fighting skill from moral judgment, of preparing for battle under the will of Whatever sheik or king paid most handsomely. A Hou-lei warrior was an instrument, a weapon, and nothing more.

  Bransen stood there blinking in disbelief, but everything suddenly made sense. “You are paid assassins,” he said.

  Affwin Wi shrugged as if that fact should have been apparent long before. She came forward suddenly and viciously, her arms waving alternating circles before her, her hands set in hooklike fashion, thumbs tucked, fingers tightly bent at the knuckles.

  The Highwayman dropped his left leg back and fell lower, his own arms up before him.

  As they closed, Affwin Wi kept spinning her arms, occasionally jabbing forward. Bransen blocked those first few stabs easily or turned aside from them, eventually coming to the same rhythm as Affwin Wi.

  She picked up the pace. He stabbed with his hands. Back and forth they circled and slapped, hands stabbing like striking snakes, hands striking hands. They went faster, more furiously. Affwin Wi dodged one of the Highwayman’s punches and kicked her leg out right before her. Bransen’s shin came up to meet it. They hopped about, each keeping a leg in the air, waving, kicking, punching, slapping like a pair of cranes battling over a frog in a crowded pond.

  Unused to this style of fighting, Bransen could not keep up. He was hit by more blows than he landed. Every strike the expert Affwin Wi delivered was in perfect balance, her weight behind the blow, her angle precise.

  Bransen knew he couldn’t win this kind of fight. He suddenly threw himself to the side and into a roll, coming up with Merwal Yahna’s nun’chu’ku in his hands. He put the weapon into motion—it had looked so easy in Merwal Yahna’s hands—and nearly clipped himself in the head. Affwin Wi laughed at him and charged.

  Bransen dropped the exotic weapon, reached into his brooch, and met her flying form with a lightning discharge that sent her flying back the way she came. She landed and stumbled, fell over and rolled, came back to her feet and stumbled again, her teeth chattering, her black hair jumping wildly.

  The Highwayman focused on the image of Jameston, focused on his brooch, focused on the power of Abellican gemstones. He enacted a serpentine shield and became a living torch, using the malachite and his fury to hurl himself at the Hou-lei warrior.

  She shrieked and tried to dodge, and Bransen knew he had her. He crashed into her, bringing both to the floor. Bransen closed his eyes, not wanting to watch the flames curl her flesh.

  She laughed at him, punched him in the face, and wriggled away.

  Bransen looked down to see that his flames were no more. He looked up at Affwin Wi to see her smiling smugly, her hand extended, a gemstone in her open palm. A sunstone. The stone of antimagic.

  “I know your secret, Highwayman,” she said.

  Bransen tried to yell his fury, but his words came out garbled, indecipherable, Storklike. His thoughts rushed back to the moment on the trail in the fight with the trolls, when a blow to the head had dislodged his gemstone and left him stumbling and helpless.

  No, he decided. This was not akin to that. This was a gemstone countering his own. Damn it! He would be the stronger! He reached more deeply into the brooch and this time felt the connection through the static of the sunstone. Bransen leaped to his feet with a growl and charged. Another furious exchange brought him around to the side. Still, he couldn’t keep up with the speed of Affwin Wi, so he focused his blocks and counters to his right side.

  Predictably, the Hou-lei warrior seized the opening and launched a left hook Bransen could not block.

  He didn’t try to, taking the hit and using the force of the blow along with his own sudden retreat to open the ground between them enough to scramble to the side and grab his sword where he’d dropped it. But the incredibly fast Affwin Wi was there to stomp on the blade. Bransen had to let go of the hilt and throw his arm up to block. To his credit, he did deflect her short left jab, but her right hand swept in from behind and above, slashing down and across. The Highwayman fell back and tried to turn his head to make the hit a glancing one, and indeed, he was nearly out of Affwin Wi’s reach.

  But she wasn’t trying to strike him. Her slender fingers caught the edge of Bransen’s magical brooch and wrenched it with her as he fell away, tearing the skin, tearing away the magic.

  He was the Stork again, so suddenly, so helplessly, blood running freely from his torn forehead. He somehow got one leg under himself and stumbled halfway to standing, but Affwin Wi was there, dropping a series of heavy and strategic blows, more to taunt and hurt him than to finish him.

  Bransen felt himself falling. Affwin Wi caught him by the shirt and hauled him to his feet. Before he could determine if he had the stability to stand, she punched him in the face. He fell away, Affwin Wi leaping a circle kick that snapped his head to the side violently.

  All the world was spinning. Bransen hit the floor facedown and helpless. Affwin Wi could finish him with a stomp to the back of his neck. He tried to turn and nearly got to his side when her foot slammed him in the gut, doubling him up. Then she kicked him in the face, straightening him out again.

  With a sudden burst of energy, Bransen pushed up to his hands and knees and scrabbled away, Affwin Wi laughing behind him. He thought of Jameston, dead Jameston, and of Cadayle, whom he would never see again. He thought of all the promises of his road and his life, of his brooch and his consistent strength, of the hopes and dreams he had dared entertain. Of his unborn child.

  “No!” Bransen heard himself cry from somewhere deep within, from a primal place of pure rage and denial.

  “No!” to Jameston’s murder.

  “No!” to his failure.

  “No!” to the sudden end of his road.

  “No!” to his loss of Cadayle.

  “No!” to the thought of never seeing his child.

  “No!” to the return of the Stork.

  Just “no!” A wall of utter denial, of utter refusal.

  Affwin Wi walked up to him.

  The Highwayman, with all the grace of a Jhesta Tu warrior, kicked his leg out behind him and hit her in the knee, locking her leg painfully. The Highwayman leaped up, spun about, and launched a barrage of punches and kicks that had the Hou-lei warrior backing desperately, her arms working in a blur to try to slow the onslaught.

  Where had he found this power and coordination? He had no soul stone, but his line of life energy ran strong and ran straight. He charged as she backed, his barrage did not slow, and all momentum fell to him, to the Highwayman, the Jhesta Tu, the angry warrior.

  Fury guided but did not consume him. He punched and kicked with rage but with all his strength and speed in complete control. He focused on the sheer wall of denial that drove him but never lost sight of his surroundings or of his opponent.

  Thus, when Affwin Wi feigned a block and
fell to the floor, rolling in to take him out at the legs, the Highwayman reacted by leaping straight up into the air so high and gracefully that it felt as if he remained connected to the malachite. He landed in perfect balance, so lightly and perfectly, now towering over Affwin Wi, who had to work doubly hard and at an awkward angle to try to fend him off.

  The Highwayman stayed focused enough to detect movement to the side and to get his arm up just in time to block the sliver of silver flying at him through the air. Holding his torn guts with one hand, Moh Li lifted another missile with the other. The spinning, many-toothed disk flashed past the crouching Highwayman. He had to finish Moh Li quickly, he realized.

  He glanced at Affwin Wi, thinking that he might have to fend her off fast and then make the run to her companion. She stood with his sword in hand.

  Another disk, another shur’a’tu’wikin, a “sword hidden in the hand,” as the clever weapon was known, flashed out at him. He couldn’t dodge and had to block again, this time the disk slicing hard as it deflected off his hand, all but severing his little finger. His digit fell limply to the side, hanging by nothing more than a strand of bloody skin.

  Bransen made a decision. He swung his hand around gingerly as he brought it in close, catching the swinging finger in his grasp and tucking his fist tight against his ribs. He broke into a run. With a great leap to the side, he crashed through the grated window.

  He dropped to the courtyard on his feet and kept on running. Never looking back, blinded by pain and confusion and a profound sense of despair, the Highwayman ran through the Entel morning. He smashed his way through the market, upsetting carts, and rushed down an alley. He found the strength to lessen his weight and make a great leap to a low roof, then scrambled from there to the city wall.

  Sentries and commoners alike yelled at him as he went right over, sprinting away, the bright morning light dazzling through the tears that filled his eyes.

  To his surprise he found no pursuit, but he kept running because to stop was to face the awfulness that had found his life.

  And he feared, too, that, as soon as he settled and took a full measure, his moment of clarity, of escape from the Stork, would be at its end, and he would become helpless once more.

  EPILOGUE

  E

  xhaustion finally caught up to Bransen on a rocky hill several leagues north of Ethelbert dos Entel. He stared at the crashing waves of the Mirianic for a short while, his mind racing every which way. His anger was gone, stolen by remorse, shaken by disappointment as profound as anything he had ever known. All that he wanted at that terrible time was to get back to Cadayle, to sleep in her arms, to forget the wider world.

  He had lost everything.

  But he knew that he would never forget Jameston Sequin. He was surprised by the magnitude of that loss. This man he had known only a few months, whom he had come to know only in the last short weeks, had become so important to him. A friend, a mentor, almost a father. And in his excitement in thinking that he had found Jhesta Tu, he had sent Jameston away.

  It had been there all along, Bransen realized, as he slumped to the dark sand beside a ridge of black rock. He hadn’t needed any tutelage from the Jhesta Tu. Was there anything they could teach him greater than the wisdom that Jameston had shown him along the road? Truly?

  Because most of all, Jameston Sequin had reminded Bransen to look within himself, honestly and openly. Jameston had nudged him to consider the truth of the many roads before him and to come to terms with the responsibilities of his training and skill and that gemstone brooch.

  The brooch!

  Bransen’s hand went up to the dried blood on his forehead, the torn skin where the brooch had been set. He tucked his legs back under him and stood up suddenly, then sprang to the ridge of lava stone, a leap of several vertical feet.

  He had no soul stone.

  No fury drove him.

  What was this transformation? Had the gemstone’s magic, so closely attuned to his line of life energy, cured him of his malady? Was the Stork lost to him forever and without need of a magical crutch? Or was it a temporary fix?

  The thought haunted Bransen suddenly. He looked away from the dark waters of the Mirianic to the north and west, toward Chapel Abelle, where he believed Cadayle to be. He had to get there, to her and to Father Artolivan. He had to be near to a cache of soul stones in case this confusing clarity could not hold.

  More than that, even without the stones, even if he became the Stork again forever and evermore—particularly if he became the Stork evermore—Bransen needed Cadayle’s warm embrace.

  He didn’t know if the clarity would last.

  He didn’t know that King Yeslnik was even then summoning the lairds of Honce to begin a new and more determined offensive, to wipe the world of Ethelbert and Artolivan and Gwydre.

  He didn’t know that Palmaristown had burned and that the rage of much of Honce was even then refocusing against Dame Gwydre.

  All that he knew was that he needed Cadayle, and fast.

  He started away and didn’t look back, so he didn’t see the sails of Lady Dreamer gliding above the dark water behind him, nearing Ethelbert dos Entel and the meeting of desperate men that would become the last, best hope for the land of Honce.