by E. S. Bell
Maybe Accora means to kill me after all, Selena thought, finding her feet.
She gripped her sword in both hands and sucked in deep breaths to help uncoil the knot of pain in her gut. She bled from a half-dozen different places; shallow wounds so far.
What happens when I tire?
As if reading her mind, Accora strode into their midst. “And so it goes until he wears you down or bests you with his strength and then kills you.”
“Then this lesson serves no purpose,” Selena said, still wheezing for breath. “I’ve been trained in swordcraft since a young child. I’m not going to get any better at it than I am this moment.”
Accora held up her hand. “Wait. Listen. Learn. I would not have been so eager to take you on as a pupil if you weren’t an expert swordswoman. But you will need to be more than that to defeat Bacchus.”
“I will weave light against Bacchus,” Selena said. “But I can’t against Jorqui; I don’t wish to hurt him.” She touched her hand to a bleeding cut on her thigh. “It doesn’t seem as if you’ve given him the same reticence.”
Accora rested her hand on the native man’s arm. Next to him, she was dwarfed: a sapling standing beside a great oak. “Of course not,” she said. “There’s no incentive to coddle you. When I saw him last, Bacchus was a span taller than Jorqui, and twice as large. He is…abnormal and not pleasing to look upon. I shudder to think what four more years of playing in his darkpool have done to him, but I can tell you that he won’t go as easy on you.”
“Easy?”
“The answer is healing. You must be able to heal your wounds as you fight if you hope to best Bacchus.”
Selena sniffed. “If that could be done, they’d be teaching it at the Temple.”
“Would they? What is the tenet of your faith with regards to the god’s healing gift?”
“The power of the god is too much for the human body to handle,” Selena said. “The price of healing power is the weakness it leaves behind. And that is balance.”
“That is foolishness,” Accora said. “Do you not weave ribbons of light in the thick of battle?”
“Yes, but that exhaustion comes later and is not so strong,” Selena said. “Healing creates an instant weakness.”
“As it should, it’s the stronger of the powers. But there is a way to postpone that weakness until the battle is done. You must treat your healing as you do your light weaving: as an offensive weapon.”
“If that were possible, I’m sure some adherent or Paladin in the centuries since the Breaking would have discovered it.”
“Some adherent did,” Accora said with a dry smile. “The fact that I’m not the adherent you had in mind makes it difficult to accept, yes? Leave it. Leave the notions of Bazira and Aluren, of Shining and Shadow behind you. There is only the magic, and it comes from the same source. All the tenets and scripture and edicts in the world aren’t going to chance the truth of that.”
Selena grit her teeth.
What Accora believes to be true and the truth are not necessarily the same thing. I trust the Temple’s teachings before I trust a Bazira.
The notion firmed her resolve and she faced Jorqui.
“We don’t have the time to argue theology and what you believe is not important anyway,” Accora said as she stepped out of the makeshift ring. “It’s what you can do that matters. Before you begin again, draw in the healing. Let it infuse you, keep it for yourself.”
“Draw it in? I have to use seawater from my ampulla. I can’t very well—”
“Ampulla,” Accora scoffed. “Drop it. It’s a hindrance. Makes for a pretty show but utterly useless.”
“Useless…” Selena felt the tingle of her cheeks burning. “You go too far, Bazira…”
Then Jorqui was there, his sword leveled. He nodded once, slowly, as if to say, Whenever you are ready. There was no malice in him, only duty, but whether she was ready or not, he came at her, his sword whistling as he swung at her legs and arms. She parried every strike but found her concentration split in two, as Accora’s instruction rattled in her mind while she defended herself from attack. A moment later, Jorqui’s sword sliced across her other thigh, splitting the skin in neat gash. Blood poured. Jorqui did not stop.
Selena gritted her teeth against the stinging pain; she could feel her skin tear open wider as she scrambled away from Jorqui’s next strike.
“Heal yourself!” she heard Accora screech from somewhere.
“I can’t,” Selena said, dodging and parrying from the native’s relentless attack. “I have to find the moon—”
“No! Say the word!”
No! I won’t befoul the healing with her blasphemy…
And soon enough Selena needed every breath she had to keep from falling to Jorqui. She kept her teeth clenched in sheer determination, and stinging pain flared across her face as Jorqui’s sword breeched her defenses. He had opened a gash that cut her from cheek to ear.
He will kill me, she thought and then there was no time for thought; she hoisted her sword up to block the native’s downward strike. The blow reverberated up to her elbow and she nearly lost her weapon. Jorqui opened another wound on her, and then another, until her blue and silver Aluren garb was a patchwork of bloody stains. Accora had been shouting at her but was now silent.
Maybe this was her plan all along. I am a fool…
There was a commotion in Selena’s periphery, though she couldn’t spare a second for it. She was going to die. Her arms were so weary she could hardly lift her sword and Jorqui, though he had kind eyes, seemed intent on ending her. Selena fell to her knees and hadn’t the strength to get up or slip out of the way.
I’ll have to burn him.
Selena raised her hand, the word to call light on her lips just as Jorqui’s sword came up…and then a shadow dropped between them and Selena saw a flurry of gray skin and a leathery wing.
Ilior.
Selena slumped back in the dirt. The Vai’Ensai charged at the native and Jorqui instantly gave up the fight, throwing his sword to the ground and then holding his hands up. Ilior wasn’t about to let him go so easy but Selena called him back, her voice weak with exhaustion. The Vai’Ensai did so, but reluctantly. He knelt beside Selena.
“What are you doing?”
“She is having a lesson,” said Accora, her voice stony.
“He would have killed her!” Ilior thundered at her. “Under your orders!”
Accora paid him no heed but turned a sour face to Selena. “No interference,” she said. “From him or anyone else.”
Selena glanced up to see the crew of the Black Storm watching now too. Whistle and Niven shared stricken expressions, while Grunt rubbed his beard restlessly. Cat’s arms were crossed casually, but Selena saw daggers glinting, one to each gloved hand. Julian leaned against the wall of the bailey, not a care in the word, as he had on Isle Uago, looking like a dagger himself, sheathed in black.
Niven had crouched beside her and now his worried face filled her vision and drew her attention to the bloody splotches on her clothing that corresponded to deep, stinging pain on her leg, her arm, her cheek.
“Let the boy do it,” Accora said, disgusted. “You need your strength.”
Niven reached for the ampulla at his belt and sought the moon. Her wounds closed and the pain ebbed. She climbed to her feet even as Niven slumped with exhaustion, but Ilior was shaking his head.
“No,” he intoned. “I cannot let this happen.”
Selena felt Accora’s disapproving glare on her back. She was taken back to her youth, training with the weapons masters at the Temple, and being admonished when she failed to master a maneuver right away, or made a mistake that resulted in injury. The same urge to please awoke in her, just as strong and potent as it had been fifteen years earlier.
But she is no Aluren master. Discard my ampulla?
Accora nodded as if she could read her thoughts. “Or die at Bacchus’s hands.”
“She is going to die at his.”
Ilior gestured with his sword at Jorqui.
Selena glanced at Julian. He had lit a cigarillo and inhaled, unhurried. “Too many distractions,” she murmured and got to her feet. “Ilior, leave off.”
“Selena…”
“Go.”
Pain shadowed his eyes for a moment before they hardened and did as commanded. He left the ring but remained in the outer bailey, watching her as Julian did.
“First, the healing,” Accora said. “Say the words, call the magic. No, put your hand down!” she snapped when Selena sought the moon. “Forget the moon. It’s there no matter how you flap and gesture at it. The healing magic is there no matter how much water you slop onto the wounded. Call the healing in the same manner as when you weave light in the midst of battle. Say the word. The word awakens the magic that lives within you. It’s already yours.”
Already mine?
The thought was hardly formed when Jorqui once again lunged at her, his sword biting at her forearm. She dodged, parried, and fell back. She tried to call the sacred word to her lips but it felt wrong, a betrayal, a blasphemy worse than taking reading of a Shaizan seer or carrying a sacred coin of Oshkat. She concentrated on keeping the native man’s blade off of her, while Accora screeched at her from the periphery.
The native came at her again and she blocked his first blow that seemed to have all the weight of a mountain behind it. He pressed her down so hard she fell to one knee, straining to prevent his broadsword from cleaving her in two. She knew she had no hope of pressing back so instead used Jorqui’s weight to her advantage. She let his sword slip and somersaulted away as he lost his balance and toppled forward. With the free moments that bought her, she reached for her ampulla.
Jorqui caught himself before he could fall, however, and he knocked the sword from her right hand and would have cleaved her shoulder had she not rolled, the ampulla tucked against her. His sword sliced her calf as she came out of her roll and blood filled her boot. She still clutched the ampulla, though the impossibility of using it was now clear. The native’s sword struck at her again and again like a snake; she had never seen a man so big move so fast. She had no weapon, only the ceramic flask she’d been given the same day she’d earned her sword, which was now lying in somewhere in the dust. Accora screamed at her to say the word, to call the healing from within. Jorqui bore down, and Selena dodged. Distantly, Ilior roared, Niven cried out, and then she went down.
Without thinking, to stave off the death in a final, defensive act, she held aloft the ampulla, like an offering to the gigantic entity that loomed over her. His sword smashed the flask to pieces. Its shards cut her hands before leaving them empty. From her periphery, Selena saw Ilior rush toward her as Jorqui raised his sword, but he would never reach her in time. Her hands still outstretched, Selena drew breath to fill them with light, to scream the sacred word, Luxari, and blind Jorqui or burn him if she had to, for it seemed he was intent on killing her no matter what Accora had said.
“Illuria!”
She gasped in shock as the word left her lips and again as an orange glow filled her hands closing her rent flesh and erasing the pain. Her heart thundered as she turned her palms in, Jorqui forgotten, and stared at the fading light and her whole flesh. Jorqui had stopped short too, but was recovering fast. Selena scrambled and called the sacred word for healing again. This time, the orange light emanated from several injuries Jorqui had opened on her flesh, and she felt an infusion of energy in her tired limbs.
“Get back!” she barked at Ilior, and the Vai’Ensai halted in his tracks. She saw the bright blue of the gem in her sword in the dirt and lunged for it. Her hand closed around the handle and came up on her feet after a graceful roll. She faced Jorqui, and with steady, strong hands, she raised her Paladin’s blade in salute.
“Let’s go.”
Jorqui nodded and lifted his blade in an imitation of her Aluren address. For the first time she noticed sweat poured off his face and blurred the artistic whorls of mud on his chest. His breath came in great bellowing gasps. But Selena knew he was far from spent. The battle began anew, but this time she led the attack, running at the big man with her blade tip before her.
He knocked it easily aside, which is what she intended. Her boot found his exposed midsection and he staggered back while she brought her sword down in a counterstroke. Her blade sliced the thick muscle of his thigh, and while she had no intent to kill, the sight of his blood flowing was satisfying to her warrior sensibility.
The cut didn’t limit him, but he hesitated and she observed that he was trained to fight but had never faced a real enemy. Sparring was not the same as battle. The wound she’d given him shocked him long enough for Selena to channel some of her healing magic into her the wound that still weakened her. The torn skin of her calf knit itself and another surge of energy suffused every fiber of her being until she felt invincible. She gave a battle cry and flew at the native man.
The battle was not easy; Jorqui’s wound didn’t slow him further and his attacks on her were frighteningly brutal. But her sword bit at him more than his did her, and when he did bleed her, she healed herself. It took practice; she needed a few moments to guide the healing to where she needed it and she almost lost an arm giving it her attentions instead of Jorqui. But she began to find the rhythm, to build the healing into her sword dance. Jorqui began to tire. Selena did not. She had a suspicion that she would be exhausted when all was said and done, but until then, she was flying. Her sword was an extension of herself. She danced with it without thought, without needing to think, admiring as if from afar, the silver fire of it in the afternoon sunlight.
At last, Jorqui, wheezing like an old man, lost his sword to Selena’s merciless attack, and he fell to his knees, arms limp, head thrown back in utter exhaustion. Selena leveled the tip of her sword to his exposed throat. Sweat poured off him like rainwater, and she could see his pulse pounding in his neck where her sword was laid.
“Yield,” she told him, but he was already beaten. But so was she.
As a cheer rose up from Niven, as the crew banged their cutlasses together for her, Selena dropped her sword that suddenly felt as though it weighed a thousand stones. She fell to her knees beside her opponent. A frightening, bone-deep exhaustion that had been lurking like a stalking animal finally pounced. She bowed her head, her bleary vision seeing nothing but the dusty ground of the outer bailey…and the broken shards of her ampulla, lying in a puddle of seawater and her own blood.
Under One Roof
From the shadow of the keep’s north wall, Sebastian watched as the big native man yielded to Selena after a long battle that had nearly completed his last job for him. Until the end. In the end, Selena had appeared indomitable, and he’d inhaled deeply on his cigarillo to quell his accelerated pulse, watching swordcraft like he’d rarely seen it. Graceful. Exact. Perfect.
But the victory was not sweet to her; the cost was high. Something had happened, something momentous, though Sebastian was too far away to know precisely what. Her flask of seawater had shattered, and yet she called healing anyway. In that act lay her victory and a kind of defeat, he guessed. He’d had little business with Aluren since the war, but knew enough. The seawater was necessary to healing. Or had been. Somehow the old witch had shown otherwise.
Now, he watched the sword clatter out of Selena’s hand and she knelt in the dust beside the vanquished native man. She was bone-weary; it was evident in every slumped line of her body, and though the shadows of the day were growing long, he could see her face in the dying light. She stared at the broken shards of her holy relic.
She looks lost, Sebastian thought, and watched as the defeated native man carried his conqueror inside. Niven, Sebastian’s own crew, and the witch followed. The old woman wore the smile of triumph. Ilior brought up the rear and he smiled not at all.
There was feast much the same as they’d been given during their first night in the Bazira’s home. The feasting hall’s six wooden tables were arrayed wi
th food and drink. Matted rushes rustled underfoot, and lit torches ensconced on the wall bore clouds of moths. Other winged insects buzzed in the air or scuttled across the floor, drawn from the jungle by the light.
As with the previous night, Sebastian paid little attention to the food and drink being set before him. Instead, he watched as Selena came down from her room looking better rested in body but no less troubled. Her eyes were shadowed and ponderous with thought. Her hair glowed in the torchlight in golden ribbons around her shoulders as she sat at a table with his crew. Whistle engulfed her in a gangly embrace that she returned half-heartedly. Niven sat across from her and Sebastian watched both Aluren share a thick, troubled look. Ilior was nowhere to be seen.
Accora beamed at Selena like a proud mother, and plied them all with centuries’ old rum from dusty crates brought up from the keep’s cellar. The atmosphere in the hall brightened as the Yuk’ri and his crew passed the bottles. Sebastian didn’t like it. The strange juxtaposition of half-naked islanders surrounding them in the hall of a stone-and-mortar keep irked him. His crew eating and drinking—but mostly drinking—until they lost all sense of caution irritated him. Even Grunt, who was more cautious than the rest, chugged the rum like it was water. And Cat, with her strange orange hair and her gloves that she never took off, even as she broke bread; Cat who was as wary and alert as her name implied had a bottle of rum tucked into each of those gloved hands, and took turns swigging from each. None of his crew seemed bothered that the Bazira witch watched them all become as helpless with drink as they had been under her kafira smoke.
Sebastian swore under his breath and looked up from his untouched food to see that Selena was gone. Niven remained, staring morosely at his own plate. The adherent looked up and saw Sebastian watching him.