by Joseph Malik
Jarrod smiled. “Is Sir Urlan okay?” he asked Daelle.
“He’ll live,” she said.
“Mm.”
Daelle perked. “That fight is the talk of the town. You beat the prince.”
“He’s not a prince yet,” Jarrod grumbled.
Moments passed. Her next words were hesitant, girlish. “This was because of me.”
“No,” said Jarrod. “You were an excuse. They’d both been looking for one. I am screwing this whole thing up,” he grumbled, shaking his head and staring at the ceiling. “I should just go home.”
It was then that Jarrod noticed the cup on the table. It wasn’t the cup that Javal had left, but one of the tall agate cups that Falconsrealmers used for wine and fine drinks. This one, the color of honey and blood, had spiderwebs of silver across it.
“I brought this for you,” she said, handing him the cup, which he was disappointed to learn was empty. “I wanted to show you this.”
“It’s beautiful,” he said. “Thank you.”
She put her hands on his, around the cup. “When we break a fine cup, we take the pieces to a jeweler, who repairs it with silver. Do you see?” she traced the lines. “It’s more beautiful now, more precious, because it was once broken.”
Jarrod turned the cup over in his hands.
“You are broken,” she said. “But you are healing. What you’re doing for us? What you’re doing for the king? All of it, lines of silver, my lord. To work with that silver, it takes heat and time and a steady hand. Sir Javal is that hand.
“I’ve seen your mind,” she said. “I know your loss. I don’t understand the world you come from, but I understand the enormity of what happened to you. I do. I’ve been in your head, my lord, and I’ve seen it. Your life was amazing. You were a hero. You were a champion. You were robbed of your glory, and your love, and all the trappings of your greatness. Nothing can bring that back, but you can be greater, here, than you ever were.”
“I need to quit letting you in my head,” Jarrod muttered.
Her voice faltered. “Do you want another tutor?”
Jarrod took her hand, and told her no.
A few days’ ride to the southwest, near the Rogues’ River Manor, Carter rode fast.
Here, west of the Falconsrealm Mountains, the sun was a forge. He was bare-chested, treating his muscles to a carcinogen-free tan. Daorah wore a light linen tunic, revealing when doused with sweat, sexy as hell and screaming her head off in the middle of a clearing as Carter thundered through, leaping his horse over fallen logs and juking to miss rocks and holes. It was a big horse, a powerful horse, a stepping-stone to a pegasus.
He raised his greatsword as he approached a head-sized squash on a stick in the middle of the clearing, sliced at it as he rumbled past, and missed it entirely. “Son of a bitch!” he roared, and reined the horse to a stop.
“You’re not concentrating,” Daorah walked up, and he swung down. “If your timing is off, you’ll nick the wing. You will both die.”
“I don’t understand—” Carter stammered, then went silent. He put his hand on the horse’s flank, felt it heaving. The key, he knew, was in aligning his own body with the horse, and that was a thing that a man raised here, riding for thirty years, could do. But he couldn’t. “I don’t understand how you keep it all coordinated. I can’t even do it on the ground. The wings are a third thing you need to keep in mind? I don’t know how I’m going to do that. I really don’t.”
“You’ll figure it out, or you’ll die,” she said. “We can all do it. You learn. It’s a dance, that’s all. You just need—” her voice trailed off.
There, with the sun behind him, hands twisting on his enormous sword, she realized that she was looking at a man who could, one day, be a king. And she shook her head in silent rage and heaviness, for she knew that this beautiful, brilliant man, hero or no, could be marked for death by jaundiced, petty nobles whose hearts he’d stricken with the same awe.
Carter sighed. “Yes? What do I need?”
Her eyes locked with his as she untied her tunic and pulled it over her head.
Carter swore the sun got louder.
Daorah had a dancer’s body, powerful and veined with sinews and slight curves of compacted muscle. Her breasts and stomach, lithe and rock-hard, were crossed and puckered with scars. It made her all the more amazing.
“Wow,” was all he could say.
She took his hand from the sword and laid it on her cheek, cupping her jaw, a simple movement, intensely intimate, and as he tightened his grip ever so slightly he felt her breath catch. She did the same to him, her fingers probing, finding a perfect fit on the cabled muscles of his neck.
“What do I need?” he repeated.
She pulled his face to hers. “You need a different kind of riding lesson.”
“Do you have a woman back home?” asked Daorah, her head on his chest.
“Oh, now you ask,” joked Carter. She shoved him playfully.
“No,” he said. “Not anymore.” There was no word for divorce; rolling the idea around in his head, he noted that their word for marriage was a derivative of their word for path, and husband and wife were masculine and feminine forms of traveler.
They also had no word for cheerleader. Thank God, he thought.
“So, does this change anything?” Carter chewed thoughtfully on a stem of grass as Daorah rested her head on his chest again.
“Must it?” she asked.
“God, I hope not.” Sheathed in sweat, dirt ground into their knees, it had been equal parts high school make-out session and bar fight. He was glad there wasn’t a bed for miles; they’d have driven it through the wall.
“Such a relief,” she said. “I’d like to think it wasn’t just a diversion to skip your lesson.”
“And here I thought this was part of it.”
“Oh, it was. As soon as we get our wind back, we’ll get you back up on the horse.” Here, she turned to face him, her voice steadfast, “And don’t you go thinking that I’m going to be any easier on you from here on out. I’ll probably be rougher with you, even,” she traced his nose with one calloused finger, then poked him on the end of it to make her point.
His eyes uncrossed as she pulled the finger away. “Who cuts your hair?” he squinted in distaste as he pulled a ragged lock to its length.
“Oh, ha-ha. Yours’ll soon look the same, you handsome man,” she foretold with a judging grin. “It gets knotted up in your coif. And during battle? It becomes so matted with sweat and caked with blood that you have to cut the clots out. It’s called a fighter’s cut. All warriors have it.”
Carter was confused by this logic, and, as usual, it showed. “So, why not just shave your head?”
“Vanity,” she replied without hesitation. This brought a spirited laugh from the giant.
In a moment, after contemplating her answer, she laughed, too. “I guess that does sound silly.”
He had to agree.
“I’ve got three links of mail embedded in my brain-pan,” she announced proudly. “And you know what?”
Smiling at her outrageousness, the giant shook his head and prepared himself for anything.
She exploded in peals of laughter, “They’re all hooked together!”
He didn’t even know why he found himself laughing. He was just ridiculously happy, on a sunny afternoon untold light-years from home, his arm around a nude Amazon, comparing old scars on a post-coital high.
His laughter trickled off, as did hers.
Here, a million miles away from the cheerleaders and the screaming crowds, I find her.
He was sure this beat the hell out of Iceland.
As he stared, he saw her eye distracted, flitting at first, then altogether, and she raised a hand to freeze the moment.
“What?” he mouthed.
“Get dressed!” she hissed, reaching for her clothes.
“Wh—” Carter did as he wa
s instructed, pulling on his breeches as she tossed them to him.
“Sheth. Four, maybe more.” She threw on her tunic—backwards, but in her haste it didn’t matter.
Carter knew a sheth was the largest of the gbatu. He’d never seen one, but he understood they were ogrish and murderous. “I thought you said they didn’t come this close to the manor.” He was still fumbling with his belt.
“They don’t. Definitely not hunting, they won’t,” she muttered as she pulled on her breeches and then her boots.
Carter was quite a bit slower in dressing, and in fact had only his breeches on and one of his boots half-laced when above him, eclipsing the sun, a red-skinned foot planted itself on the log just over his head.
Above them, the sheth was fumbling with its loincloth under a tangle of armor.
Still unseen, and not taking his eyes off it, Carter reached out his arm to Daorah, who handed him his greatsword.
He bit his upper lip and coiled, flashing his eyes once at her for affirmation.
She rolled clear as Carter roared to his feet, plunging the blade through a sheet of mail, center mass. The super hard steel crunched in his palms as it butchered its way through the iron links, and the blade sank until the torn mail twisted up around it.
The sheth stared down at him, and in a long and hideous moment Carter got his first look at the ruling caste of gbatu.
The sheth was easily eight feet tall stooped over and four hundred pounds of gristle and bulk—all the misdirected anger of the world stuffed into an array of armor, belts, weapons, and fur. Its arms were hairless and the width of Carter’s thigh; near its knees, immense hands ended in wicked black nails.
The undershot jaw sported yellowed tusks. Its eyes, huge and slow-blinking, squinted through the daylight.
As Carter stared up into those eyes, and it stared back, his soul quaked with the uncertainty one feels having riled a madman.
With a bellow, the beast fell on him, and Carter had his hands full with a snarling, biting, wrestling, eight-foot nightmare infinitely stronger than he was.
Carter ducked under a haymaker, then locked his arms around its head and kicked its legs out. The neck snapped, and it went limp, heavy as the world. He stepped clear and let it fall.
He’d practiced the move a thousand times—taught it a thousand times more—but had never used it. It was a dangerous move, a lethal move. An illegal move.
A handy move.
Even on something this size, the neck couldn’t support the body’s weight.
He grabbed for the sword and yanked. It came free after a couple of hard pulls.
He stared at the gore on the sword and his hands, then back at the body as it twitched.
He began to shiver.
Until he saw two more leaping over the log, fully airborne, these two in helmets and armor, with weapons drawn and fangs bared, each sailing through the air and charging him at a loping run.
Carter’s lungs and arms surged. His back straightened, his muscles tautened, and he spit into the palm of his right hand and cleaned the blood away on his pant leg. He roared a wordless challenge as he braced the sword at his side like a spear.
He was about to remind the world why God still built Norsemen seven feet tall.
One of the sheth had a flail, really just an eight-inch iron cylinder at the end of four feet of chain; the other wielded a huge sword of a type he’d never seen before, two blades welded together at the tang and at the tip, the size of an ironing board with space for two or three more blades in the hollow between.
Carter, for all practical purposes as large as either, charged them both.
They roared; he roared.
Carter snarled up the flail around his blade and ducked low, not breaking stride, as the cylinder whooshed and rattled by his head. From two steps away he launched off both legs and met it with a forearm.
The full-body check was his greatest gift; the ability to time flex and release, to become a three-hundred-pound whip-crack. Carter had knocked men unconscious, broken helmets, and once nailed a fullback hard enough to give him amnesia.
He leaped in the air as the sheth went over, driving both feet onto its chest, feeling bones snap like muffled gunshots under the armor.
Carter backpedaled in his guard as the second one closed.
It was as big as the first one he’d fought, but in a curtain-sized shirt of square metal scales held together with strips of mail and an ornate helmet painted with fierce, exaggerated eyes and teeth.
Carter and the sheth crossed and uncrossed blades twice, testing each other, before it rushed in. Carter sent the huge ironing-board blade out of line and reversed across its face with both hands. He felt the steel bite, saw the shiny metal revealed under the bluing and paint, and he stepped through, pivoting hard, going for its left ear, leaning in and swinging for the fences. It ducked but not enough, a fat dome of metal from its helmet spinning in the sun as it crumpled.
Hell of a sword.
And a shitty helmet.
Carter faced the other, which had found its feet and drawn a long knife. It moved in a protective crouch but spat a chunk of bloody flesh and ivory at Carter’s feet in what could only have been a boast. Carter had checked it so hard it had smashed out several of its own teeth.
Carter nicked off a piece of finger, circling. It snarled and barked, opening and closing its hand to beckon him in.
It grabbed at the blade and lunged at him with the knife.
Carter let it have the sword. He took the knife hand at the wrist, snapped the arm backwards at the elbow, cleared the knife, and jammed it into the mail under the broken, jutting arm.
He took the greatsword by the ricossa and wrenched it away, then drove it through an iron plate high on the chest, feeling the metal scrape, feeling it skip off the ribs, feeling it mire and finally hit the armor on the far side. The sheth struck at him, wildly powerful. It screamed, it gurgled, it grunted.
He slammed the handle from side to side, severing everything, until it collapsed. The jangle of armor was determined and brief.
There was another dead one, pinned against a tree on the far side of the meadow with a broken sword through its mouth; near it, a clawed forearm twitched in a patch of crimson-slashed daisies. The sporadic grunts of the dying sheth nearest him echoed with those of an unseen other, no doubt bleeding to death in the tall grasses. Daorah was nowhere to be seen.
“Daorah!” he called, wiping his tightening forehead with his biceps. It came away smeared with bright blood. The last one had clawed out a wide funnel of meat from his arm and it bled thickly.
Daorah appeared from the tree line, nude from the waist up, wiping her sword with her shirt. “Look at this,” she told him. “Come here.”
Carter followed her to the corpse of a sheth. He was unsure of what he was supposed to be looking at, so he asked.
“The armor,” she said.
It was the same armor he’d noticed on the large one that he’d killed. “Nice.”
“Oh, yes,” she agreed. “Look, here,” she walked over to one of the corpses in the field. He followed, and looking at the body, now he noticed a difference. This one’s armor was a haphazard collage, many suits of armor tied, sewn, and riveted together into a jerkin.
“That one,” she assessed, jerking a thumb back toward the big one with the scale armor. “They don’t wear armor for its protective value. It’s a trophy. See? This one,” she pointed again to the closest corpse, “He’s killed four humans. Two in mail, one in brigandine, and one knight, probably, for the leather armor.”
“Okay. So we need to find out who’s missing.”
“Yes. For starters.” She walked back over to the largest one. The lesson wasn’t over yet. “So where’d he get this?”
“You’re asking me?”
“You’re the adviser to the king.”
“Hm. Could he have made it?”
“They don’t make armor. Th
ey don’t even cook their food.”
Carter scratched his head. “Someone made it,” he assessed.
“Right.”
“Could he have killed someone my size?”
She glared at him like a cat with its ears back. “There is no one ‘your size.’ Besides, he couldn’t fit in your armor any more than you could fit in mine.”
“So, someone out there’s making armor for these things.”
“That’s a Gavrian helmet. Gavrians use iron plates set in their mail like this. Not all of them, but their knights do. Gavrians rivet their mail, and this crap is just pinched shut. It's cheap, and weak, but still, where’d he get it?” She bent to work the helmet off. The head beneath was equal parts warthog and bridge troll.
“Christ, that thing is ugly,” said Carter.
“They’re far prettier dead.” She turned the helmet over, looking for a manufacturer’s mark. “Are you hurt?”
“Tired,” Carter said.
“Good. Let’s call it a day. Get its legs.”
“Jarrod?”
It was Javal’s voice at the door.
It was well before sunrise, and though the room was lit from the moon and the coals in the fireplace, it was still nearly freezing. Jarrod untangled himself from the spectacularly defined limbs of a visiting girl from Longvalley named Eothe.
“Hey, sire,” he said.
He kissed Eothe on the forehead and rolled out of bed, apologizing. She mumbled something and buried her face under the pillow.
A frank conversation with a healer some weeks back had brought up what Jarrod intended to make the lynchpin of his entire experience here: the wonderful, wonderful moon.
Reproductive cycles were in lock step with the big stripy bastard that took up a tenth of the horizon, and women were only fertile every hundred and four days. Because humans here reproduced much more slowly than their counterparts on Earth, Mother Nature had never seen fit to introduce venereal diseases as a method of de facto population control. The practical upshot of this was that Jarrod now found himself in a world where shaking the sheets is treated as a competitive sport.