“Thank you,” Kevral said. “I’ll tell my mother you said so.”
Ra-khir nodded graciously despite the sarcasm. “If you’d like, I can teach you a move or two.” He smiled, stepping back to give Kevral room to enter the ring. He had extended an invitation any Erythanian boy would sacrifice a week of dinners to hear and never doubted Kevral would embrace the opportunity.
“No,” Kevral said. “But thank you for the offer.”
The response caught Ra-khir off-guard. “No?”
“No,” Kevral repeated.
Ra-khir could not believe what he heard. “No?”
Kevral’s patience evaporated. “Am I speaking barbarian whistling language? ‘No’ seems pretty obvious.”
Ra-khir’s grin wilted. “Wouldn’t you like to learn to fight like me?”
Kevral’s legs swung, heels alternately thumping against the wooden rail. “Is that what you were doing?”
The question confused Ra-khir. “Is what what I was doing?”
“Fighting.”
“Practicing, yes. What did you think I was doing?”
Kevral shrugged. “Clambering around like a big, old tortoise. Maybe taking a sword and shield for a walk.”
The disrespect struck Ra-khir momentarily dumb. Then rage swept in to displace surprise, “You’ve insulted my honor.”
“I’m sorry,” Kevral said, in a voice wholly lacking apology. “I meant to insult you.”
Ra-khir knew of only one response to such a challenge, and the realization that he faced a child did not change the obligation, only the choice of end point. “Then I’ll have to call you out.”
“Call me out?”
Ra-khir explained, believing Kevral ignorant as well as a fool. “Demand a duel.”
“Go ahead,” Kevral shot back.
“I just did!” Ra-khir shouted, his generous mood utterly spoiled.
“All right.” Kevral hopped down from the fence. In a single movement, the short sword swept from its sheath, licked between Ra-khir’s fingers, and plucked the hilt from his hand. Ra-khir’s sword pinwheeled from his grip, landing at his feet. The short sword completed its cycle, returning to its sheath. Kevral regarded Ra-khir with an insolent, irritating calm. “I win.” The young features crinkled, “Or was I supposed to kill you?”
Ra-khir retrieved his sword, clutching it so tightly his fingers blanched. Shaking rage would not allow him to notice the skill inherent in the stroke. Usually, disarming would have left him shy a few fingers, at least. “You won because you cheated. We hadn’t even decided place and time yet. Or end point.”
“Oh.” Kevral looked appropriately chastised, head low and eyes rolled upward to meet Ra-khir’s. He was the taller by a full head and nearly double Kevral’s weight. “I just assumed here and now.”
Ra-khir had no intention of stewing for days. “Fine then. Agreed. Here and now.” He balanced his weight, taking a defensive position with sword out and shield in front of him. “End point . . .”
He was still deciding when Kevral’s sword rasped free, glided around the shield, and hammered his crosspiece. Impact ached through his fingers, and he lost his grip a second time. His sword thumped to the ground.
“No!” Ra-khir screamed, composure completely lost. “The gods damn you to the pits, you’re still cheating. I hadn’t finished the particulars. I hadn’t even finished my sentence.”
“I’m sorry.” Another unabashed apology. “Would you like me to announce my every strike in detail? Or would you like to choose which ones I make. I wouldn’t want enemies on the battlefield calling foul.”
“Very funny.” Ra-khir suffered the first stirrings of hatred for the sarcastic child who had returned nastiness and humiliation for kindness. “Remember, I called the challenge. The law says I get to decide the particulars. I could choose death as an end point.” His emerald eyes glared into the softer blue ones, seeking a fear he did not find.
“Death?” Kevral repeated, then shrugged with resignation. “All right, then. Death.”
Ra-khir sucked in a deep breath, further irked that his bluff had backfired so badly. Now he either had to back down or slaughter a child. “I only said I could choose death, not that I wanted to. It’s not my job to butcher a snotty, little boy, only to teach him a lesson.”
Kevral grinned with impertinent amusement. “I already said I didn’t want your teaching. That’s what started this whole thing. Remember?”
Ra-khir remembered. “It’s a different lesson I’ll be teaching you, bratling. You like disarming so much? Fine. We’ll fight until one of us no longer holds a sword.” Ra-khir deliberately chose what was probably the child’s only maneuver. Besting Kevral at that would make a stronger impression, and his knight’s honor would not allow him to suggest an end point that gave him the advantage.
“How ’bout first blood?” Kevral added.
“What?”
“First blood and disarming.”
Ra-khir studied the youngster in front of him, wondering if he had made a serious mistake. But his eyes assured him he was not facing a small adult. The pudgy face, innocent eyes, and supple hairless cheeks confirmed his first impression. The proportionately big head and short limbs only made him more certain. Twelve, this boy, no older. Surely Ra-khir would have heard stories about an Erythanian child with as much talent as this blond had, so far, displayed. He knew of no visiting dignitaries currently in Erythane who might have dragged along a disagreeable child, and Kevral spoke the Western tongue with standard Erythanian/Béarnian dialect and accent. Having never left Erythane himself, Ra-khir could not fathom a youngster traveling from another town to Erythane alone. Only one explanation seemed possible: Kevral knew one good move and had twice caught the knight-in-training unprepared. To refuse the request would make him look weak, so Ra-khir agreed. “First blood and disarming.”
This time, Kevral did not charge with the fierce bravado that had won the first two passes but also cost many young warriors their lives in battle.
Ra-khir hated to swing the odds too far in his opponent’s favor, but his conscience would not allow him to win a contest unfairly. He removed the shield strap from his arm. “You may use it.” He proffered the shield.
Kevral remained in place, making no move to take the offering, studying Ra-khir with mild interest and patting the short sword’s hilt. “Thank you, no. I have everything I need.”
“Oh.” Ra-khir furrowed his brow, frowning. He had not expected the refusal and tried to interpret his duty on the basis of this new development. His mind worried the problem for several moments. In a dilemma, better to follow the course that works against me. No one could question my honor then. “Then I won’t use it either.” He set the shield aside.
Kevral followed Ra-khir’s motion, obviously confused by it. “Why not?”
Ra-khir straightened. “It wouldn’t be fair.”
“To me or to you?”
The question seemed ludicrous. “To you, of course.”
Kevral snorted. “Why would it matter to me if you chose to hamper your vision?”
“Hamper my vision?” Ra-khir had never heard of a shield referred to in that manner before. Then again, he had never trained under any man but the knight’s armsman or his father. “If that’s how you think of a shield, then there’s much I could teach you. Perhaps you’ll learn to appreciate opportunities for knowledge rather than mocking them.”
Kevral dismissed the words with a bored wave. “Use the shield if you’re used to it. If we both fight the way we usually do, how can that make it unfair?”
Ra-khir rolled his eyes at the child’s simple logic. “Then the fight would go always to the richest, those few who can afford to buy real weapons and metal armor . . . and the lessons to use them.”
“Isn’t that usually what happens?”
The question stopped Ra-khir cold. More than three centuries had passed since the Great War that had pitted Eastlands against Westlands, and the worst threat to Béarn in his li
fetime had been minor skirmishes with pirates on the southern and western coasts. He had never fought a battle or, until now, even a duel. He answered the only way he could, “Not when there’re Knights of Erythane involved. Our code of honor won’t tolerate injustice.”
“No matter,” Kevral added, then obviously quoted someone wiser though Ra-khir had never heard the phrase before. “A skilled man needs no weapons or protections but uses those of his enemy against him.”
The conversation grated on Ra-khir, who had no wish to defend the way of right without his teachers present to assist. He was still only a knight-in-training. It seemed as if the situation had come full circle, with Kevral now seeking the teaching refused moments earlier; except, where most of the boys begged for sword training, Kevral apparently sought understanding of the tenets. Ra-khir wondered if he should steer the youngster toward becoming a knight but immediately discarded the thought. Kevral’s rampant disrespect, constant questioning, and arrogance would make the child a poor candidate indeed.
Kevral raised brows so wispy and blond they seemed nearly invisible. “Are you ready this time?”
“First blood and disarm.” Ra-khir settled into a balanced starting stance, left leg leading, body turned to make as small a target as possible. “I’m ready. Let me know when you are.”
“You’ll know,” Kevral said cryptically, not yet drawing. This time, the youngster waited for Ra-khir to strike first.
The knight-in-training lunged in with a low jabbing feint that he turned into a looping drive for Kevral’s hilt. Kevral drew and blocked. They disengaged simultaneously, but Kevral riposted before Ra-khir could reposition. The tip scraped skin from Ra-khir’s thumb before chopping the haft from his grasp. The blade tumbled toward the dirt. Kevral caught it by the grip before it touched the ground. A sword in each hand, the young stranger smirked, flipped Ra-khir’s weapon, and offered it back, hilt leading. “Perhaps you could use it to herd pigs.”
The rage that conversation had dispersed returned in a wild rush. Hatred smoldered, and need filled Ra-khir to best the nasty child. If he did not, he feared his head might explode. “Once more!” he shouted through clenched teeth.
Ra-khir did not clarify, and Kevral did not ask. “Fine. This time it’s first blood, disarm, and knock the other one on his butt!”
Though far from a standard choice, the end point pleased Ra-khir. Nothing could make him happier than watching Kevral land, backside leading, on the cold, hard ground. Since the child had determined the result, he put aside the guilty realization that his superior size and strength would give him the vast advantage here.
“And you can use the shield,” Kevral added.
Despite his fury, Ra-khir stuck with honor. “I don’t want to!”
“I want you to,” Kevral returned as loudly. “Use it, damn it! I don’t want you saying later that the contest wasn’t fair.”
The implication that he might use the lack as an excuse further enraged Ra-khir. His fists opened and closed spasmodically, and his cheeks felt aflame. Needing to disperse his anger as much as possible and unable to find the words to insist, he snatched up his shield and charged Kevral.
Graceful as a cat, Kevral sidestepped. As Ra-khir barreled past, Kevral’s sword slashed a superficial line along his forearm, then cut the hilt from his fingers. At the same time, a small foot cracked against Ra-khir’s shin, sweeping his balance out from under him. Ra-khir plummeted. He crashed to his hip on a jutting stone, and pain stoked his temper. He rolled, felt cold steel at his throat, and froze.
Kevral stood over Ra-khir, the points of both blades at his neck, wearing a cocksure grin that Ra-khir would have given his horse to displace. Too bruised and mad to consider the danger, he batted the blades aside.
Kevral laughed, the sound gratingly musical, and tossed Ra-khir his sword. Then, flipping the other to its sheath with an airy toss of white-blond locks, Kevral leaped the fence and headed away.
Glad to see the flippant youngster go, Ra-khir hoped, by all the gods, he would never see Kevral again.
* * *
Warped and diluted by glass, sunlight trickled through Béarn’s castle window, casting a stripe across the coverlet on King Kohleran’s bed. Propped on three fluffy pillows, the old king could breathe without much effort, though the water in his belly hampered full expansion of his lungs. Lying flat took the pressure from his gut; however, the fluid then pooled in his chest, drowning him into fits of choking. Since his illness began two years ago, it had gradually worsened despite the best efforts of every healer in Béarn and its sister city, Erythane, to cure him. His hair had lightened from salt-and-pepper to white, and his dark eyes had developed a film that blurred the world to shapes and colors. His once hearty appetite had disappeared, and his limbs had gone skeletal aside from the bulges of collected fluid.
Yet, despite his illness, Kohleran’s mood remained relatively high, as it always did when one of his grandchildren came to his room to visit. His favorite, sixteen-year-old Matrinka, perched on the window seat, stroking the calico cat that was always with her. Now, it curled in her lap. Her smooth, young hands twined paths through the fur, and the cat curled with closed eyes, its purring audible across the room. That he had given her the animal as a bedraggled kitten rescued from a sewage trough three years ago, before his health had failed, only made the association sweeter. Matrinka’s long, straight hair framed an oval face and full lips so like her grandmother’s. The standard Béarnian dark eyes peered out from under a fringe of black bangs. Luckily for her, King Kohleran thought, letting a smile creep onto his features, she looks nothing like me.
It was modest self-deprecation. Though never the handsomest of his brothers or peers, Kohleran had sported the classic Béarnian features: a full black beard that met with his hair, mustache, and sideburns to form a mane, shrewd brown eyes, and a whale-boned frame packed with fat and muscle. Like his predecessors, he had carried his mass along with his title, large even for a Béarnide, a race known for its size as well as the craft of its stonemasons.
Matrinka was one of the oldest of his grandchildren, the only child of his second son. Nearly all of his younger grandchildren avoided him, daunted by the odor and appearance of his disease. Kohleran also had three grandchildren older than Matrinka, all the offspring of his firstborn, a son. The twenty-one-year-old visited him occasionally but had his hands full tending a rambunctious four-year-old daughter of his own. The twenty-four-year-old, a girl, rarely concerned herself with matters not involving herself and a mirror. Kohleran had lost his eldest grandson scant months ago to a strange paralytic illness that had taken the life of Matrinka’s father months earlier. Oddly, no one else had caught the disease.
Kohleran broke the lull in their conversation, though sitting in silence with his granddaughter pleased him enough. “How are your cousins?”
Matrinka smiled. “Fine, all fine. I’m sure I’ll have a crowd to answer to about you when I leave.”
Kohleran believed Matrinka spoke from kindness rather than truth, but he did not voice his doubts aloud. It only made sense that his descendants would worry more for their families than over the king’s lingering death. Since Kohleran had fallen ill, his four most promising heirs had died under strange circumstances: two of the inexplicable illness and two of accidents. The latter still made him frown. To all appearances, his fourth daughter had fallen from a tree, skewered by a branch on the way down. Yet it made no sense that a thirty-eight-year-old mother of two children would scramble around in a tree like a squirrel. His oldest child, a son, had apparently drowned in a lake just outside their mountain city. The two-year string of bad luck had goaded Béarn’s citizens to whisper about a curse on the line of high kings, and Prime Minister Baltraine had even insisted on a silly ceremony led by a priest to try to remove the curse. Within a week after the rite, Kohleran’s grandson had died. Kohleran responded to Matrinka’s hollow assurance. “You tell all of them I’m doing all right. And I love them.”
“
I will,” Matrinka promised. She rose, dumping the cat to the floor. She closed lacy curtains dyed brilliant sapphire and sporting Béarn’s crest: a tan, rearing bear on a blue field. Crossing the room, she gave her deteriorating grandfather a hug that expressed her love better than words ever could. For a moment, the familiar chorus of aches disappeared while he embraced his favorite granddaughter.
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you, too,” Matrinka whispered, studying his jaundiced, wrinkled features with concern rather than the more familiar revulsion others accorded him. “Get some sleep. I’ll be back tomorrow. Is there anything you want me to bring?”
Though sincere, Matrinka’s offer seemed senseless. Anything Kohleran wanted, the servants or ministers would get for him. “I’d like to see those flowers I smell on your hair. Could you bring one?”
“I will.” Matrinka turned and headed from the room. She held the door while the cat padded out behind her, then closed and latched it softly.
King Kohleran settled back on his pillows, joy dispersing discomfort long enough to allow him to sleep.
* * *
Prime Minister Baltraine paced the meeting room floor from the door to the graph-covered slate board to the semicircular table. Béarn’s other five ministers watched in silence, allowing him to speak first, as court etiquette demanded. They sat along the rounded side of the table, leaving the flat edge, the head, for their leader. But Baltraine felt too jumpy to sit. Instead, he pinned his chair to the table with his knee, leaned over its back, and tented his fingers on the tabletop. He studied each of the faces before him, reading as much of each expression as he could.
Abran, the aging foreign minister, kept his head cocked to one side, a residual defect from a stroke several years past. He laced his fingers through his gray beard, the movement habit rather than nervousness. Sixty-eight years old, only five years shy of the king, he had held his position since before Kohleran’s coronation. In his forty years of service to the kingdom, Abran’s loyalty had never fallen into question.
Beyond Ragnarok Page 4