Elora held the long sword favored by the warriors of the eastern islands. In length, it was a rough match for Khory’s blade, but hers was shaped along a shallow curve, with a single cutting edge. It was primarily a slashing weapon, and as such had almost no equals. Both women wore mail and padding but these weapons were intended to cut through both. Their best defense, now as always, was their own skill.
They stood perpendicular to each other. Elora offered Khory a profile view, holding her hilt a little above and behind shoulder level so that the blade sloped along a downward arc past her cheek to rest atop her leading arm. Khory faced her, legs apart, sword in one hand, point down, a disconcertingly relaxed posture.
Both were in boots and trousers and wore gauntlets to protect their hands and forearms. Bandannas were tied about forehead and throat. They were sodden, and both women were breathing heavily. This wasn’t the first duel of the day, and to Elora’s great delight, they both had the bruises to show for it.
She wasn’t here by choice, this was a decision both Renny and Khory had made for her and enthusiastically enforced.
“I can take care of myself,” she’d protested, when they made her their proposal.
With those words came movement of her own, reflexive and blindingly fast, inspired by some cue far beyond the range of rational thought or awareness. Her hand leaped to her traveling pouch and emerged with one of the knives carried within, the shortest of the curved islander swords. As Khory’s straight blade slashed toward the junction of neck and shoulder, Elora used her own much like a bar, with both hands on the hilt simply to block it. The shock of impact, one blade against the other, bounced her from her seat and she turned that to her immediate advantage by kicking out against it with both feet. Unfortunately, Khory’s muscles were a match for her reflexes and she cleared the tumbling chair with a powerful leap that landed her almost on top of Elora. Elora took a desperate slash with her small sword, at the same time trying to pitch herself beneath the table to the relative safety of the other side. Khory blocked it with a foot, stomping down hard enough to make Elora cry out, though she never relinquished hold of her weapon. That didn’t matter much as the demon child casually laid the tip of her sword against the younger woman’s breastbone.
“Fighting with furniture.” She smiled, and offered Elora a hand up. “I like that.”
Elora couldn’t help herself. She stuck out her tongue.
“The point is,” Renny told her after she’d righted her chair and collapsed herself into it, draining the glass of water Khory gave her in a succession of monstrous gulps, “you have enemies.” Before she could make any sort of snarky rejoinder, he went on, “And your cover is not as all-embracing as you believe.”
“How do you mean?” She thought he was about to say one of her companions had betrayed her, and hurried to marshal every possible rebuttal.
“Your secret may be safe from the Maizan, but as you’ve said yourself, there are other forces at play in the world. You stood against them at Ganthem’s Crossing.”
“There were no survivors, Renny,” she told him, and the memory gave her no comfort. “Who’s to tell?”
“Don’t talk foolishness, Elora. Greater Faery is the home of the Wild Hunt. There is nothing the High Elves enjoy more than a chase. The wilier their quarry, the more determined they become. You have to be prepared.”
Khory opened their duel, bringing her sword up and around in a sweeping arc that sizzled the air in its wake. At the last moment she reversed her hands and the direction of her cut, pivoting on her offside leg to bring the sword around behind her back in an attack that struck at Elora’s flank rather than her head. It was a magnificent feint and Elora had read it perfectly. The crystalline tang of steel on steel sounded through the top floor of the library, whose decent width and exceptional length made it ideal for such training. At his own desk, floors below, the professor rolled his eyes and shook his balding, unkempt head in his hands, asking yet again how he’d allowed himself to be drawn into such a chaos. Elora swung her long sword parallel to her own body, point to the floor, to block Khory’s strike. In the same flow of movements, while maintaining the block, she swept the two blades up and away, continuing the pivot to use her offside leg as a scythe to cut Khory’s out from under her.
She had the satisfaction of seeing the older woman fall, but fast as she tried to follow through with her sword, Khory found a way to backpedal clear. Again and again, Elora swung at her with all her strength, energized all the more by a determination not to be beaten, but she couldn’t find a way past Khory’s guard. Thrust, thrust, parry, reverse, slash, slash, thrust, slash, kick, parry, thrust, slash, Elora maintained the pressure on her foe with an intensity that would have left anyone else gasping, somehow managing to increase the speed of her attacks as she progressed, painfully aware from past experience that she dare not allow her opponent the slightest respite.
Seeing none offered, Khory seized her own opportunity. She let the girl disarm her, at the same time controlling the disengagement so that her sword fell where she wanted it. She slapped Elora’s blade aside and followed up with a brutal sequence of blows to the body. Fists to begin with, and then with feet, as Elora tried to open some distance between them so that she could once more effectively bring her sword into play. A roundhouse kick to the solar plexus doubled Elora over, another to the upper body sent her sprawling.
Before Elora hit the floor, Khory had her sword in hand and was on her way in for the kill. Only this time the surprise was hers. Flat on her back, Elora parried Khory’s hammer blows, lashing out at full extension in a series of sweeping attacks that forced Khory into a succession of frantic bunny hops, lest she lose both feet at the ankles.
From that point there was no more delicacy or art to their duel. They faced each other at an arm’s length and bashed away at each other, as though with a pair of clubs, emphasis on upper-body strength and reaction time, hardly any at all in delicacy of manner. Suddenly Elora shifted gears, totally changing the dynamics of the fight to those of a fencing match as she took a step backward and lunged. It was a splendid move, until Khory snapped her own blade down in a wicked parry that turned aside the attack.
Where the swords had come together with the shock of steel bars, they now took on the aspect of crystal chimes, a succession of taps that followed one upon the other faster than a drumroll beating the call to arms.
Then, out of nowhere, a mistake. Elora pushed herself a hair too far in a desperate attempt to score against her foe. This wasn’t altogether unexpected, she’d been visibly tiring as the duel progressed, though this hadn’t significantly affected her speed. The thing was, the extraordinary speed of the duel had its effect on both combatants. None watching could recall seeing this level of intensity maintained for so long. At such a pace there was no time for a conscious assessment of the situation. Action prompted immediate reaction, any strategizing had to be conducted on a separate level of being. The aggressor had to have a plan, the defender had to intuit that plan and determine an appropriate counter while actively and ferociously engaged in her own defense. At the same time both combatants had to remain ever ready to capitalize on any opportunity.
That, now, was what presented itself.
Elora was vulnerable. Khory responded accordingly. Two moments, encompassing far less than a second of elapsed time, and the instant Khory committed herself, she knew she’d been suckered.
Elora spun herself along the length of Khory’s outstretched blade, hissing as it sliced through padding, mail, and flesh, accepting the pain of her wound as a necessary price of victory. She struck the taller woman across the face with her elbow, then brought both hands up and together on the hilt of her long sword and used its blunt pommel as a hammer to deliver an even harder blow. In a real fight, the follow-through would have been to sever Khory’s fighting arm and then, as the woman reeled in shock, either take her head or open her body fr
om shoulder to hip. Instead Elora hooked an ankle and dropped Khory on her back, collapsing onto her sword arm to pin it down and slapping the flat of her own blade across the other’s chest.
She couldn’t do any more after that. She flashed a grin to proclaim her triumph and let herself topple after her sword, to land all nicely cat-curled in a ball by Khory’s side, her head resting just below the warrior’s breast. She was breathing so hard it hurt. Khory, damn her, hardly more than normal.
“I hate you,” Elora grumbled.
“You won.”
Elora pushed herself up to a quasi-sitting position, weight spread between a hip and an arm she used to brace herself in total denial of the fact that every muscle in her body felt as limp as overcooked noodles.
“You didn’t fight as hard as you could.”
“If I had, you’d be dead.” Khory blinked at her, narrowing her gaze in a way that made the tattooed design over her left eye appear even more hawklike and creating the unnerving impression that Elora was truly in the presence of something other than human.
“I did not fight you to the best of my ability,” she said matter-of-factly. “But you fought me to the best of yours. You fought on my level, Elora, and you found a way to win.”
“Well,” Ryn Taksemanyin called from a safe distance, brandishing towels and a jug of lemon-flavored water, “after that display, I sure as hell wouldn’t challenge either of you. On dry land, anyway.”
“And in the water?” Elora asked him.
His tone was flippant but the answer deadly serious. “Drag you deep and watch you drown before you reached the air again.”
Elora shuddered.
“That’s cold, Ryn,” she said.
There was a gauntness to his form that was new to him and he carried himself with a gingerly delicacy more common to old men. The spell the Maizani had used had been a cruel one and its negative effects on him were only intensified by the determination and manic ferocity of his resistance. Thorn had worked long and hard to repair the damage, but the fact remained, he was too far from home. The wounds were to his spirit more than to his flesh and true healing would come only with his return to the blue-water ocean. There’d been discussions of sending him east, to the Chengwei coast, but his true home was off Angwyn, now ice-rimmed and as uninhabitable below the waves as above them.
He hunkered down beside the women and handed them each a glass.
“Wyrrn don’t fight for fun,” he told Elora. “We love our tussles, but there’s a big difference.”
She stripped off her hard leather tunic, her mail undercoat, the padding worn beneath that, all the way down to her formfitting cotton undershirt, and tossed the lot carelessly aside. She took a step away, thought better of it, turned back before Khory had the chance to cough a quiet reminder, and gathered up her leavings to place them neatly on their racks. Occasionally the habits of her mistaught youth overwhelmed the better behavior she’d learned since. Taking proper care of her gear and space was her own responsibility. She had no one to pick up after her anymore.
Then, after returning her long sword to its scabbard—a deceptively plain and unassuming piece of work, without the usual ornamentation, whose beauty lay wholly in the quality of materials and craft—she held out a hand to Khory and hauled the warrior to her feet. They exchanged a formal bow of disengagement and Elora stepped through one of the windows to the balcony beyond and some badly needed fresh air.
After the warmth within, given aspects of a steam bath by their exertions, the outside chill was a bracing shock. Elora didn’t mind in the slightest, even though she was bare-armed and in a thin shirt, dressed more for the opposite end of the year. There was a steady wind from the northwest, stiff enough to make her eyes water, and a definite hardship for anyone else.
She heard the thump of a cloak being shaken open behind her and then its familiar weight across her shoulders. It needed no fastening. So long as she stayed still, the cut of its high collar would anchor it in place.
There was a fair view from the roof, over the skyline of the university to the dome of the Citadel. A glance over the edge showed the walkways mostly empty of traffic, the students all in class. Ryn stepped up behind her, taking position to block some of the wind. She appreciated the consideration but couldn’t help a frown at the feel of his fur. It had lost a fair portion of softness and luster these past months and she could feel bones beneath where before had been a cushion of body fat and muscle. There was a smell to him of sickness. She’d offered to help, as she had with others, only to discover this was a healing that lay beyond her abilities. There was nothing wrong with the body, it was his spirit that needed restoration.
“It must be hard,” she said, “to be so far from home for so long.”
“We’re a wandering kind,” he replied with a dismissive shrug, as if that was all that needed being said.
“No regrets, then?”
“I’m here by free choice, Elora. It’s a struggle worth the winning, with friends worth the knowing. What’s to regret?”
He folded an arm about her and gathered Elora even closer so that he was right behind her. “I can’t get over how you’ve grown,” he told her.
“Sorry.”
“No no no, that’s not what I mean, it wasn’t a criticism.” He was speaking so quickly his words ran over themselves, spurting out before his thoughts could sensibly order them. He called it quits with a deep breath and a rueful groan.
“I feel like a piece of taffy,” she grumped.
“Nothing fits?”
“I guess it’s just because everything’s happening so fast, all at once. I mean I can see the difference. I keep banging into things because by the time I get a decent sense awareness of my proportions, they’ve all changed again.”
“It won’t last forever, you know.”
“Your word on that, Ryn Taksemanyin?”
“What do you mean?”
“Never mind.” Then, suddenly: “Do you have the slightest notion what—or who—I am?”
He started to reply with a platitude, but realized she’d set him up for just that.
“I don’t,” she said flatly. “Not like the rest of you.” She looked out at the far distant horizon and let out all her breath in a great huffy cloud of exhalation. “I need a place I come from, Ryn, so I can know where I want to go.”
“And if that’s not possible?”
“It’s like trying to sail without a keel. I can’t fight the wind and current.”
“Bollocks,” he snapped, taking her own pet expletive. “You have that place, Elora—a Nelwyn farming village, a Daikini castle, a sorceress’s stronghold, a tower in a great and doomed city. We begin our lives as the gods and Fates design us, but a lot of what comes after is ours alone to determine.”
“Like being turned to silver?”
“No more, no less than assuming a coat of fur. Sometimes homes have to be built. Sometimes, Elora, dynasties and epochs and sagas have to be started. Sometimes, friends have to die.”
“Maybe I’m not up to the job, Ryn.”
“Then you’re not.”
They both heard a shout from below and peeked over the parapet to see a student race the length of the yard, to disappear into the classroom building across the way.
“You don’t know him,” Ryn said to her, hazarding a last word. She knew full well he meant Duguay, that his concerns about the troubadour echoed those of the brownies. It was plain to her as well how afraid he was that this antagonism would sever the ties that held them close, but also how determined he was to speak his piece.
Her response was in kind. “I don’t know myself,” she told him with a sad smile. “Yet.”
“The Citadel semaphore’s busy,” he said, pointing westward.
“I see.”
The semaphores were big, square flags, mounted on long poles
that could be swung independently through the whole arc of a circle, and together, the two worked in concert to represent all the letters of the alphabet. Certain combinations could even establish whole words. Given the view from the plateau and the distances involved, they were often the most effective means of transmitting messages to and from the cataracts.
“Are the eagles up?” Ryn asked her.
Elora craned her head toward the horizon, her eyes shifting marginally out of focus.
“Both. Anele’s a couple of miles high, I think. Bastian’s roaming farther out. They have a rider coming up on the last cataract, another a half day behind, yet another a half day behind that. All pushing hard.”
More shouts from the yard, a gathering tumult as every door was flung wide and the entire student body rushed into view. Professors as well, their dark robes and frantic scurrying reminding Elora of an anthill under attack.
She heard footsteps behind, the uneven tread and strained breaths of the professor as he clambered up the last flight of stairs, the still and silent glide of Khory’s boots.
“What do you think?” Ryn asked one and all.
It was Khory who answered, as though this was a moment she’d long been waiting for.
“The Maizan.”
It was all the news by breakfast.
“A delegation,” Duguay reported as he and Elora shared the morning meal with Susan and the rest of the staff around the biggest table in the tavern. When she arrived, Elora remembered this as being as bountiful as any feast, platters laden with fruits and cheese, crackers and breads and jams, porridge and raisins and honey, plus whatever was available from the stove. The variety remained, but less so the quantity. Wholesale prices were rising on a weekly basis but everyone knew that even a fortune wouldn’t matter much if there was no food to be bought.
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