"The death stroke must be clear in its purpose." A bearded man in burgundy robes watched from the back of the room. "There can be no mistaking your intent. Again."
"That's Samael Vircon," Sienna whispered. "Duke Mulravey's Consul."
Shada realized she was running her fingers across her neck. Staff in hand, she started toward Eric, only to be brought up short by the shimmering barrier. The passages could only be entered and exited at the nexus doors.
Eric leapt across the room, the steel tip of the whirling staff invisible until it slammed into the dummy's head, sending it flying.
"This ploy must be Vircon's," Sienna said. "He couldn't convince Mulravey to join the uprising, so he'll have you killed in front of the entire city, forcing us to attack. It's brilliant."
"I'm glad you're so impressed that your boyfriend is planning to decapitate me."
"You can beat him." Sienna was thinking hard, barely listening.
"No, I can't," Shada said. "If I do, there's still a war, right? So I have to avoid his hits for the full thirty minutes while he's actually trying to murder me?"
Eric rounded again on the mop-topped target. Sweat poured from him. His eyes blazed with malice.
"Don't let anger guide your blows." Vircon growled. "Kill her as we planned."
"I'll kill her," Eric seethed. "She broke my nose."
"We need to go." Sienna stared past Shada, into the darkness of the tunnel ahead. "Now."
Shada looked over her shoulder. The flowering vines were in murmuring motion. They drew together, gaining form and focus, knotting into a vaguely doll-like shape. The figure grew and gained nuance, blossoming into a life-size simalcrulum, a taut, long-haired girl of thorn and vine, blue flowers for eyes, white for a mouth.
Shada recognized herself.
Sienna grabbed Shada's hand and pulled her back the way they'd come. The vine princess shambled purposefully after them.
* * * *
They burst back through the original nexus, and stood again at the bottom of the Sanctum Stairs. Sienna raised her hand and recited the words. The topaz barrier reappeared, sealing the vine creature within the passage. From within came low murmurs of frustration.
"I told you this was a terrible idea." Sienna's breath came in sharp gasps.
"Now we know," Shada said.
Sienna glared for a moment, then nodded. "We have to call off the challenge. If a Mulravey kills you in front of the entire city, there will be civil war. Every House in St. Navarre will muster. Father won't be able to stop it." Sienna's fear had boiled away; she'd shifted to political mode, her mind racing.
"I'm touched by your confidence."
"Shada, I have every confidence in your ability to punch, stab, and pummel, but these stakes are too high. Father must decide our course of action."
Shada saw the wisdom in this. But she had been played. Out-maneuvered by a junior league Consul and an arrogant pretty-boy. She was frightened but she was also furious.
What would Shada's father think if she refused a challenge? The King never had.
"You're right, Sienna." Shada surprised her sister with an impromptu hug. Sienna tensed, and then relaxed in her arms. Shada kissed her on the cheek, found the precise spot at the base of her neck and jabbed her ring and index fingers in, hard and fast.
The Tarryman's Touch was a fiendishly difficult Kelvish martial art Shada had studied for months. It required a precision she managed perhaps a quarter of the times she attempted it.
Sienna crumpled like a rag doll. The sleep induced by the Touch would last hours, and end with a headache of astonishing intensity. She would be apoplectic, but that was nothing new.
* * * *
The Proving Grounds lay just outside the Citadel, a dusty expanse in the shadow of the towering city wall. A patchwork of fields and obstacles, stables and armories, their primary purpose was the training of the Scarlet Guard. But for a challenge the fields were cleared, bleachers erected, and the white battle circle painted across the hard-packed dirt.
Shada stepped out of her tent to the edge of the circle. The newly risen sun blinded her for just a moment. The cool air carried scent of the surf, crashing just beyond the wall. She wore the challenger's uniform of white suede trousers and moccasins, a white long-sleeved tunic; the blank canvas on which Eric's hits would be recorded.
A ragged cheer erupted from the assembled crowd, a press of thousands reaching from the perfumed worthies ensconced in the circle-side boxes to the beggars and thieves nesting on faraway roofs.
Twenty yards across the circle, Eric, similarly dressed in white, a clean bandage across his nose, approached the white line.
Shada lifted the Alari staff. She had kept it with her all night to gain a feel for the unfamiliar weapon. It placed her at a sharp disadvantage. A challenge fought with capped rapiers or blunted swords would turn on speed and precision. These staves rewarded physical strength. Nonetheless, Shada thought the staff a fine weapon for the purpose. The challenge rites had been created to end the cavalcade of death brought on by traditional duels, an unfortunately popular St. Navarre pastime. But every challenge was born of fury. A dull rapier made poor conduit for rage.
The Adjudicator raised both arms in the air.
Shada dipped the wooden end of her staff in a bucket of oil. Eric did the same.
Within the battle circle, combatants were constrained only by the laws of the challenge. All others fell away. Three hits determined the victor, and weapons were limited, but the contestants were not constrained as to how they attained their hits. Punching, biting, clawing—anything was permissible within the circle. It was considered poor form to purposely kill your opponent, but death sometimes occurred in the pursuit of three hits, and by law could not be punished.
If Eric wanted to kill her, no one outside the circle could stop him. And likewise he could not be detained or attacked until free of St. Navarre.
This was the fulcrum of Vircon's plot, and why Shada loved the white circle.
Her life was circumscribed by protocol and politics. Painted and gowned for receptions and audiences, chained in loops of diamond and ruby, paraded before cousins, uncles, and foreigners who might wish to murder or marry her depending upon the month's political winds, she was a pawn in game whose rules changed daily.
She had won three challenges before her fifteenth birthday. She had been injured and once nearly killed within the Circle, but in truth nowhere else she was truly happy. On the Proving Grounds her fate depended upon her skill, her speed, and her strength, nothing and no one else.
The Adjudicator dropped his arms.
Shada entered the circle. Eric bounded toward her, spinning his staff in lazy circles.
Shada held her ground. Her strategy was necessarily simple: get through the thirty minutes without dying. She braced her legs and shifted her grip to the center of the staff.
Eric stormed in high, as he had in the practice room. He feinted with the steel end, straight at her face, the purpose of their earlier encounter immediately clear. He expected her to protect her eyes.
Shada held back, anticipating his abrupt shift in direction. She blocked the blow, intended to break her knee. She drove both staves into the ground, and using them as a brace, kicked high and hard, into his ribs then under his arm.
Eric staggered backward but kept his feet, and his staff in hand.
Shada spread her grip wide along the staff and punched at him with each end in succession. He blocked the first two blows, the third, barely. She snapped the end of the staff forward. Eric landed on his back, a dark smear of oil marking his heart.
The crowd took up a raucous cheer.
The Adjudicator ruled the hit and waved Shada and Eric back to their respective sides of the circle.
Gregory awaited her. "Nicely done, Princess. Please don't do it again."
"Gotta make it look good." She powdered her hands against the coming blisters.
"Caine tells me you never found him last night. And yo
u sister seems to have vanished."
"This don't win/don't lose thing is pretty complicated. It's probably not a good time to distract me."
The Adjudicator signaled.
Eric charged. He put all his momentum, his entire body, into a massive downward blow.
Shada had plenty of time to block, but the impact stunned her. Eric didn't withdraw but pressed down harder, to force the staff from her grip.
Shada bent her knees, trying to hold on to the weapon. Even as she did so she realized it was mistake. Eric drove a sidekick into her stomach. She staggered.
The sharp end of his staff whipped about, gauged to tear out her throat.
Shada twisted about so the metal tip slammed into her shoulder. The impact knocked her off her feet, smashing the staff from her hands.
Eric, expecting a lesser impact, was also off balance. But it would only take him moments to recover, and Shada's staff lay beyond her reach.
She rolled towards him, grabbed the oiled end of his staff, and smeared it across her tunic. He tore the staff from her hands, raised it over her head. But before he could bring it down the Adjudicator signaled his hit.
Eric had fought in too many challenges to ignore an Adjudicator. He hesitated, and the opportunity was gone.
He glared at Shada as she regained her feet and picked up her staff in trembling hands.
She was still shaking when the Adjudicator again waved them forward.
Eric came at her in the same manner, using the staff as a sledgehammer. She took a similar stance until the weapon descended, then dodged from its path. Counting on her resistance, Eric nearly fell forward.
Shada caught him behind the knee, laying him on his back.
She felt a sharp prick on the side of her neck. Samael Vircon, standing in the crowd just beyond the circle, dropped a small instrument into the folds of his robes.
Eric glared at Vircon, anger clearly sketched across his bandaged face.
Shada pulled a sliver of metal from her flesh. It was slick, and smelled of licorice and wine.
Poison. She was already dead. The only question was how quickly the toxin destroyed her.
Terrified, she launched a too-aggressive whirlwind of attacks. Eric staggered beneath them, but managed to trap her staff with a sideways block.
"Coward," she spat.
"Vircon's doing, not mine," Eric said. "Bastard didn't think I could take you unaided."
Shada felt dizzy, tired. Her vision blurred. But her thoughts cleared. Unaided. The toxin wasn't fatal. If she simply fell down and died, there would be no war. Eric had to be seen to purposefully kill her. The poison was designed to slow her.
She broke away from him. Her legs felt sluggish, as if weighted. She had trouble raising her weapon. She dropped to the dirt as his staff whipped just over her head. She rolled left and then right as his steel tip shattered the earth beside her face.
He stomped on her calf, pinning her. He raised his staff for the deathstroke.
On her back, Shada threw hers like a javelin. The throw was weak, but to avoid it Eric had to step backward, freeing her leg.
She struggled to her feet but felt dizzy to the point of nausea. If she could score a hit the Adjudicator would call time; she'd be able to charge foul. But with the toxin embedding her limbs in molasses she had no hope of reaching her staff.
She realized she probably should have listened to her sister.
Eric circled her. Shada might be nothing but a pawn to Vircon, an inconsequential game piece to be swept from the board, but not to Eric. She had unmanned him in public, damaged his precious looks. He hated her.
She felt a flush of affection for him as he raised the staff to kill her.
Shada saw a single, unlikely possibility. He wanted theater, thrashing and screaming. He needed to kill her before she passed out.
She fell toward him, inside the reach of his weapon.
Eric caught her under the arms. He dropped his staff. He clamped his hands around her head, his thumbs digging for her eyes.
It was a good move. It would make a spectacular start to the war.
Shada drove her ring and index fingers into the base of his neck.
Eric shouted, shoved her away. A mis-applied Tarryman's Touch, intensely painful. Poisoned, she'd had little chance of successfully executing it.
Stunned, Eric glared at her.
Shada could only manage the most basic of reflexes.
Her fist landed in the center of his face. Blood exploded from beneath the bandage. Eric screamed. He stared down at his white tunic soaked red.
She hit him again.
Eric collapsed to the ground. Shada stood for a second, noting the official score, one hit apiece, before she fell beside him.
* * * *
Shada woke in the top room of the Healer's tower, beside a window overlooking the windswept sea. Her sister sat at her bedside.
Gregory withdrew the waking herb. A chorus of bruises called for Shada's attention. She managed to sit up, shakily.
"Vircon dosed you with Deshune root. A dulling toxin." Sienna rubbed her scarlet neck. "The after-effects are mild compared to say, those caused by the Tarryman's Touch."
"Eric?" Shada ignored Sienna's dig.
"Returning home in chains," Gregory said. "Along with his Consul. Sienna brought me the details. We informed Mulravey. The Guard found Deshune needles on Vircon. Eric, faced with the evidence and rather despondent over his face, gave up the plot."
Shada couldn't help the grin. She had possibly been pig-headed, and undoubtedly owed Sienna an apology, but even Gregory couldn't fault her results.
"Yes, it was a well-considered ploy, Princess," he said. "Once again, your tactical resourcefulness is all that has preserved us from your breathtaking stupidity."
"Don't win, don't lose. I did only as instructed."
"Indeed. Your father will either commend you or have you thrashed once you recover. Possibly both." Gregory stalked from the room.
Shada was left alone beneath her sister's glare. "I did this for you," she said, finally. "I know you wanted to marry him."
Sienna studied the ceiling. "Eric Mulravey is a firstborn jackass to a country squire with delusions of grandeur. I despised him before I knew he was a cold-blooded killer."
"Not cold-blooded." Shada felt strangely protective of Eric. "You seemed so happy he was coming."
"We faced an insurrection that could have torn the kingdom apart. Marrying one of us to Eric solved the problem. If I didn't appear delighted, it wouldn't have worked. So I was delighted." Sienna walked to the door. "We may yet be married off to worse."
"I won't," Shada said. "I swear I won't."
Sienna nodded. "That's why I had to."
Mira
Steven Brust
A reputation is an intangible thing, and it may have little correspondence with objective truth. This is especially true of the reputations of warriors and users of magic. The less people know, the more they will make up.
Steven Brust is the author of some 25 fantasy novels, including the best selling Vlad Taltos series. He currently lives in Austin, Texas.
In the eleventh year of the reign of King Dorian III, Mira came to the town of Dimhold-on-the-Eiger, riding her dun-colored horse called Kacha. The daughter of the merchant Tinash had been kidnapped and was being held for ransom. Mira used a lock of the daughter's hair and the Alembic of Torn to find the girl, and the Scarf of Queid to conceal herself when she entered the kidnappers' lair. Her sword, called Sleeper, made short work of them. The daughter was returned to her father, traumatized—both by the kidnapping and the way it ended—but otherwise unharmed. Mira left Dimhold-on-the-Eiger the next day, and the people said she was of noble birth and had taken up the sword when her husband and children were slaughtered by raiders.
In the fourteenth year of the reign of King Dorian III, she reached the stronghold of Verskel, at the foot of the Echosy Mountains near the town of Straid. The people of Straid had been subject
to the depredations of Verskel and his bandits for ten years, but Mira entered at night, and breached the walls with the Word of Ackomi. Leaving a trail of dismembered bandits behind her, she found Verskel in his bed and passed Sleeper through his body. When the people of Straid wished to hold a fête in her honor, she was already gone; and they said that she had been a simple merchant's daughter until she was raped, and thus she had taken to the road and the way of the blade.
In the sixteenth year of the reign of King Dorian III, she arrived in Turonn, which had been held for many years in bonds of fear by Baron Dahin. The Baron sent all his forces against her, but she used the Fan of Rad'mkel to raise a mighty dust cloud against them. In the confusion she found Dahin in his camp, and, not deigning to draw Sleeper, broke his neck with her bare hands. By the following dusk she mounted upon Kacha and left Turonn, and the people said that she had been a peasant girl whose lover had been struck down by bandits, and so she sought always for vengeance.
I met Mira in the town of Kinstin, in the region of Caryn, in the seventeenth year of the reign of King Dorian III. She was at the Live Oak tavern, drinking quietly by herself. I asked her if any of these reasons were true, but she only laughed and would not answer. She laughed like a warrior, and it came to me that she must have been the daughter of a great warrior who had no son to carry on his work, and so she had chosen to do so.
That night in the Live Oak, some spoke of a man in Lerperu who was taking young men and women and selling them as slaves to the Worneldi, and the next day Mira was gone.
Impossible Quests
Kate Coombs
A princess sent on an impossible quest meets a prince sent on an impossible quest, and they join together to rescue a princess in a tower. Then they have to deal with their real problems: the people who sent them on the impossible quests.
Kate Coombs usually writes fantasy for children and teens, but she couldn't resist trying her hand at a SWORD AND SORCERESS story. Her most recent book is THE RUNAWAY DRAGON, a sequel to THE RUNAWAY PRINCESS. She also writes a children's book review blog called Book Aunt. Kate believes that life is an impossible quest and that storytelling makes the journey happier for all of us. She lives in the Los Angeles area, where her day job consists of driving around teaching sick kids in their homes for the school district. Despite a serious lack of antique swords and cats in her household, Kate is a die-hard fantasy fan.
Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword and Sorceress XXV Page 20