A Glimmer on the Blade

by Rachel E. Baddorf

  She moaned in pain beneath him and in an instant, he had scrambled off her and knelt beside her. “Are you all right?”

  Eyes wide with fear she said, “I hit a rock.” Gingerly, she got on all fours and then stood rigidly. Her back was clearly killing her, her breath hitching. In the place where she had fallen a large mottled rock lay half covered with pebbles.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you...” he trailed off, feeling stupid to have said it.

  “You win this round,” she snapped, making an attempt to hobble in the direction of camp.

  He caught her arm. “Don’t. Just hold still.” His instincts were telling him he needed to touch her back. Concentrating, he felt along her spine with gentle fingers. Strong muscles, the imprint of the ribs, and there. The vertebra was out of alignment, twisted by the rock. “Let me go,” she demanded weakly.

  “Just hold still,” he said, determined now. Following his instincts, he laid his palm near the problem, twisting until it felt right. Then he struck, a palmstrike just at the right angle. A cascade of little pops followed his strike, and she gasped again. She spun on him, hand ready to strike, when she froze.

  “The pain’s gone,” she said, eyes wide. “How did you do that?” She moved cautiously, stretching her back and arms.

  He shrugged. “Just seemed like the right way to fix it.”

  “I thought you meant to cripple me,” admitted Anoni. The breeze off the water whipped her ponytail around her face. She took a moment to get it under control.

  “Maybe you should trust me more,” he said, a smile playing on his lips. “I’ve got the magic hands.”

  At that, her attention was caught on her own scarred hands and the spell lines that curled like vines on her fingers as complex as a maze.

  “You were saying, before I beat you?” prompted Corin.

  She gave him a mocking glare. “Right. I was saying...” She was still running her thumbs over the scars and abruptly went serious. “You put up with me, Corin. Lately, I’ve only thought about you. But, I can understand if you don’t want me.” She seemed to realize what she was doing and hid her hands behind her back.

  “Why would you say that?”

  “You’ve been keeping your distance since we got back to camp...since the Ozuk walked out of the fire.” She looked out to sea. There was a storm far out, slanting rain into the waves out past the reef. Her voice was carefully controlled when she spoke. “I can understand if you wouldn’t want a scarred up soldier with an evil spirit in her. I can understand if...” She trailed off helplessly.

  He pulled her hands into his. “Anoni, I understood you were complicated from the beginning. No offense, but your scars are who you are. If you were a man, they would all say, look at the war wounds, the proof of your bravery. I think I can handle a little scarring.”

  She went still. “Do you think that it’s nothing?”

  “I think that a beautiful gown can cover anything you want covered. It will just make you more beautiful,” he said with a smile, not realizing it was anger that had her eyes sparkling.

  “A gown, huh. Cover up what needs to be covered,” she said with deceptive calm. She manhandled him so his back was to the men down the beach and stood in front of him, using his height and bulk to cover her from their sight. “Hold still a moment.” She put a hand on his shoulder to steady herself and began unlacing her boots. One at a time, she stripped them and her stockings off.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, bewildered.

  She thrust the boots and stockings into his hands. “I want you to see what you think will look so good in a gown. I don’t know if the current trends have a high enough neckline to cover everything that should be...”

  He frowned at her as she undid her belt. “What are you doing?” He tried to grasp her hands but she wrenched them away. She took off her belt, pulling the daggers and sword off and shoving them into his arms. She added her boot knife to the pile. The belt she re-buckled into a loop and hung over his neck like a winner’s wreath at an Aquillion Racing Day.

  She began unbuttoning the little silver buttons of her shirt quickly. “We can get some matching lace gloves for the hands...” she muttered angrily. Her shirt was open over the cloth and leather breastband he had seen when she was injured. She untucked a wound garrote from her breastband, put it in the balled-up shirt, and threw it at him.

  “Whoa, whoa,” he said, glancing behind them in embarrassment.

  “You don’t want to see what you’ll have to dress up? What you’ll tie up in corsets and tangle in skirts and petticoats?” Anoni demanded with a hint of hysteria in her voice. She glared, daring him to look, daring him to see, daring him to turn away in disgust. He had seen her general shape in Skevelia, but it had been dark. Now the wiry muscles that stretched underneath all that freckled creamy skin was clearly on display. She glared at him, her amber eyes burning with complex emotions. “This was from the marines,” she said, touching the wound on her right shoulder, small but still pink and a little swollen. It had been a tear in the skin. “This was the from the Forge, winning my graduation,” she explained, voice intense with challenge and old pain, as she touched a serrated scar running from her left collarbone up around the back of her neck. It had been hidden by the high collars and her hair before. “This was Arjent’s contribution,” she said touching an old three-inch knife wound between the ribs, which had been cauterized and was now shiny.

  “You don’t need to do this,” he managed, caught between heartbreak and arousal.

  She shot him a razor-edged glare and unbuckled the breast band, throwing it at him so he had to stoop to catch it. When he straightened, he went very still, drinking in the sight of her pert breasts he had only gotten a vague impression of in Skevelia. They would never be as lush as Delis’s, too much muscle underneath. Corin’s thoughts were interrupted when he noticed there was what looked like a v-shaped stab wound on the inside curve of her right breast.

  “This,” Anoni said as she smoothed a hand between her breasts until she touched the scar, “...this was a northern raider’s javelin; he was going for my heart. Lucky for me he had bad aim,” she added in sarcastic bitterness. She passed over the line of small scars across her lower ribs, and pulled off her pants and loincloth in one motion. She threw them at him too, and stood before him with her fists clenched. She was nude. Nude, not naked. No one naked ever stood with such barely contained rage. He tried to remember to breathe. He could see the shapely hips, the muscular legs. Corin focused on one hip that had a jagged scar diagonally along the outside curve. He watched as Anoni traced it fondly.

  “You think all the marks of this life can just be covered up?” She curled her lip at him. Anoni threw out her arms and turned her back to him.

  The back of one calf had a star shaped scar over the big muscle. Corin saw that even her feet had several shiny burns and notches. But those were just peripheral observations. What held him riveted were the five crossed lines on her back. They were the product of a whip, he was sure. They had a few deeper gouges around them. Whoever had used the whip had had bits of metal worked into the braided leather. He stood speechless, welling with sadness, and some burning emotion he couldn’t name. “A bit of pretty silk, and they’ll never know,” she said bitterly. She crossed her arms under her breasts. “You only want what you think I am. From far away, in the shadows.”

  “Why don’t you quit? If you weren’t a Dragon, if you didn’t disguise yourself as a man, you wouldn’t get hurt.” He couldn’t get the idea of the whip out of his mind.

  “I can’t go back, Corin. Once you learn to take up the sword, stand up for yourself, perhaps walk like a man, you can’t go back. You try it,” she spat. “Wrap me up in silk skirts, keep me at home, and expect me to wait while the world burns down for someone to save me.” She shook her head. “It would never work.”

  Still flinching from her imagined pain, he asked, “You couldn’t go back to being a normal woman? Couldn’t be a man�
�s wife? Even for love?”

  “I don’t know, Corin. I haven’t seen a love that would be worth it yet. I haven’t met a man who wanted to give me that love...Being someone’s wife isn’t my ultimate goal. Not for a long time now.”

  It hurt to hear that. That burning pain in his chest made him angry. It was like she didn’t even see him. He was right here and he needed her. In that moment he reached for anything that would hurt her back, any lie for a quick and easy verbal wound. “Aren’t you tired of being something you’re not, Anoni? Aren’t you tired of being an imitation? You talk of truth, but all you do is lie to the world and to yourself. You couldn’t handle being a normal woman, you haven’t got the heart for it!” Corin watched her flinch as the acidic words hit her, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself. “You couldn’t feel love if it came up and bit you in the face. You’re too hard. Too broken!”

  She spun on him. “I have more heart than a bastard like you could ever have. You think I lie to myself? What about you? You say you want to help with the prince, but you want me to stop and get on some high-heeled slippers and petticoats to do it! He needs a warrior, not another simpering idiot. You said you feel like you’re a mirror? Bullshit! You’re a mirror because you don’t have the balls to do anything for yourself. You never did a single thing from your own decision. You don’t have the character. I bet any courage you had in battle is because you stood around with us Dragons for a few days! You want to blame everyone around you for who you are and what you’ve done. You do what the rules tell you to do, even the wrong rules! Because you don’t care enough to break them!” Anoni vibrated with rage, thought about punching him, but instead she stomped toward the ocean.

  He shouted after her, “You’re just being a crazy whore!”

  “Who are you calling whore? Whores get paid. You haven’t given me shit!” she screamed back at him and dove into the waves, leaving him there on the beach holding her clothes with her belt around his neck.

  Corin took her clothes back to the camp of men, spitefully planning that she would have to walk naked from the water, displaying herself for the men. He dropped the clothes in a pile by the fire. Vansainté took one look at the clothes and had to fight a smirk.

  “Serves her right,” Corin muttered angrily.

  Vansainté bit his lip. “Do I even want to know?”

  “She’s in the water,” Corin growled.

  “I take it you mean swimming, and not say, her corpse?” Vansainté was failing to stifle his laugh.

  “She just...She’ll give you all a show when she gets out.” Corin clenched his hands. The anger wouldn’t die down, it just burned brighter the more he thought about it.

  “Ah, we’ve seen that show before. Sorry, among us, she has no problem with nudity. Don’t ask me why,” Vansainté said as he spread his hands to ward off Corin’s angry, recriminating look. “She doesn’t sleep with us, and we don’t think of her that way. That was the bargain.”

  His disbelief must have been clear because Vansainté cut in. “Okay, so we say we don’t think about her that way. She’d kill us.”

  “She’s been alone all this time?” asked Corin.

  “She likes alone time. And she said once she didn’t believe in displaying what wasn’t for sale. When she’s around women, or men that she might actually be interested, then she’s self-conscious. But us, we’re her sword-brothers,” explained Vansainté.

  “When she argues with you does everything spiral wildly out of control?” Corin flexed his hands, fancying the idea of her neck in his grip.

  “Yah. You’ve pretty much defined her.”

  Corin let out a frustrated sigh and stomped off to sit by himself. He found a great boulder in the trees to sit on to try and steady his emotions. They had been like angry children, grasping anything and everything to hurl at one another. But the things she had said had hit the mark. The things he had done, his former attitudes, had been the products of a childhood of following the lead of people in Aquillion, the mold the Shaisos had built around him. That hurt, but it wasn’t the root of his anger. He didn’t know right off what it had been. This tearing pain was swirling in his gut. He thought back to their conversation, trying to find where it had gone astray. He had made a comment about normality and love. And being a wife. He had asked if she could give up being a Dragon and be a wife.

  Shock hit him like a club on the back side of his head. He almost fell off the boulder, his body was suddenly so senseless. He had in effect asked her to marry him and she had told him no. But his mind scrambled to sort though it; it was more complicated than that. It was always more complicated than that when it came to Anoni. He had made a comment about dressing her in a gown. A beautiful gown. She had been insulted, enraged. She had told him she thought he was pansy, lacking in character. He was too conventional for her. She had already broken nearly every convention of society in the Empire. She was without a family, an exile, who pirated Empire gold, and had infiltrated the imperial bodyguards under an assumed identity. To be told so outrightly that he had no character stung, and it would be easier to be angry and stay angry. Write Anoni off as a bitch and a liar and avoid her for the rest of the time they had to travel together. But it didn’t simplify matters. Assuming Copelia could make a new disguise, he would love her and he would still have her in every room he entered for the next thirty years. And if he couldn’t get her to marry him he would be married to another woman. Despite the fact that affairs were normal and expected in Aquillion, Anoni had her own code. He didn’t think she would settle for being the lover of the emperor.

  He resolved, though his hands were shaky at the thought, that he would have to ask her to marry him before she found out he was the emperor. To be crowned, he had to pick a woman to marry. If he could get Anoni to admit she wanted to marry him before she found out he was the Prince she had such complicated feelings for, he would be miles closer to eventually actually getting her to marry him. He needed as much time as possible to talk her out of her wagonload of anger she held onto in reaction to his actions back when she had been exiled. He would have to do something to convince her he was sincere after the argument they just had. Something big...

  He got down, going to fix the pile of her clothes and weapons. Once he was crowned he could do something about her status as exile. And deal with Markham Shaiso. If she didn’t kill him first for lying to her...

  ***

  Aquillion

  Copelia

  A hired carriage transported Copelia and Ildiko west, over one of the busy star bridges, and across the river Tahoi into the city proper. It had taken several hours to get the injured priestess out of the palace, and the carriage out of the heavily patrolled upper-class neighborhoods that surrounded the palace. Ildiko leaned in the corner of the dark carriage, asleep despite the bumpy ride; she wore the cloak Copelia had tried to use to impress the Dragons all those days ago. Copelia wore her second best cloak. She had left them in an alley outside the palace grounds before going in. There was no way a respectable carriage driver in the palace district would carry bedraggled workers anywhere besides the local guards’ station house. But two rich women, one of whom has turned an ankle on a visit to a relative’s manor, were perfect passengers.

  They had been lucky though, Copelia knew. The homespun cloak she had brought to cover Ildiko’s robes had worked, but they had still been wet, muddy, and injured. Getting out of the palace had taken a very bad story about working on one of the palace fountains, and some determined flirting on Copelia’s part. Luckily, the guard was busy getting things ready for the night shift and did not question them much besides a halfhearted attempt to set a date to meet her at an inn for a drink. Harilson of the Palace Guard would be sadly disappointed when he showed up at the Northgate Inn and she never showed.

  Copelia turned her thoughts to finding a way to get the prince out of the light well. The guards definitely knew what he looked like, and Shaiso would have to be insane not to have them searching for him. She woul
d have to get him out as the prince slept as well. From the guesses Ildiko made about the ceremony, they would need a safe space and supplies. They had to get him out before they could wake him. The carriage pulled up and she gently shook Ildiko awake. She had given the driver an address in the merchant’s district three blocks from Caruda House. Copelia got out, paid the driver, and helped the priestess out onto the street. Ildiko leaned heavily on her, unable to put weight on the injured leg.

  “We’re almost home. Just a little more,” Copelia said.

  They limped past spice merchants, furniture importers, and curio shops. It was early evening: the shops were closing down, the last customers of the day heading home with packages. Copelia did her best to not look like a target for pickpockets, but had to heavily rely on hope for that one.

  Finally they rounded the corner and came to the gate of Caruda House. The stablehand, Timos, made them pull back their hoods before he would open the gate. Copelia gifted him her best smile before adding swift instructions for a healer and a few men to be summoned to take charge of Ildiko.

  Caruda House was a hive of activity. Most of the windows of the house were lit with light particular to lightfish—it didn’t flicker so as undulate as the fish circled in their globes. The stablehands were doing the evening rounds of the stables, feeding and watering the horses. Copelia studied it all with narrowed eyes, trying to tell if a passerby would notice anything out of the ordinary. The house just looked like it was full of guests—not something Caruda House had ever been before, but not something that would send spies to Highlord Shaiso’s ear.

  When the able-bodied men came, Copelia told them to put the woman in her study and to make her comfortable until the healer arrived. She saw Ildiko off, the older girl blushing and murmuring protests at the young men who carried her carefully between them. Now that Copelia had taken care of Ildiko for the moment, she turned back to Timos and told him to find Sarousch and to tell him to meet her in her brother’s office again.