“So your claim—and please correct me if I’m wrong—is that Balint is too dangerous to be trusted with the weapons he’s bought and paid for. But your master can be trusted with them, apparently. Is that what you meant to say when you stepped out of the woods with your sword in hand?”
“I might have approached. . .awkwardly,” Miklos said. “I didn’t know who I’d face, if I’d be attacked on sight. It’s been known to happen.”
“I wasn’t going to attack you, and if you had any mastery of the surrounding auras, you’d have seen that. My breathing is regular, my ire wasn’t up. And I was curious. Who was this armed man who thought he’d take me by surprise?”
“I’d never have attacked one of your temple fraters, believe me. I was only going to defend myself if necessary.”
“I’m not a frater, as my student tried to tell you,” she said, gesturing with her chin at Gyorgy. “I am something else. A bladedancer sohn.”
He paled a little bit at this, but steadied himself quickly enough. “I swear you’ll be paid for your work.”
“We’ve already been paid.”
“Return the coin to Stronghand, if it eases your conscience. You’ll have your gold either way, and by selling them to me instead you’ll keep the weapons out of that villain’s hands. Believe me, no good would come of it.”
“You’ve traveled so far. It must be two weeks on foot. Or do you have a horse waiting for you on the post road?” Narina shrugged and waved off his response. “It was a long, wasted journey, either way. I have no idea what put this idea into your master’s head, but I advise you to turn around and give him my warning. Leave peacefully, and I’ll let the matter drop.”
“I won’t leave here without those weapons.”
“And I told you I won’t sell them to you.”
Miklos’s face hardened. “Then we’ll take them by force.”
Chapter Four
Narina threw back her head and laughed. She wasn’t amused by Miklos’s threat, but thought it important to show what she thought of it. His face flushed, but it was better to anger him than have him draw his sword and take the threat to the next level.
“How could you stop me, anyway?” Miklos asked. “If I want the weapons, I’ll take them. It’s only a question of whether I cross your palm with gold or if you’d prefer steel at the throat.”
A small storm lived inside Narina. When she was younger, and her father had stood patiently over her shoulder, showing her the best posture to hold the swords for various attacking positions—the dragon in the right hand, arm bent at a slight angle across the face, with the demon in her left and pointing straight down at the side—she had sometimes wanted to scream in frustration at the mind-numbing boredom of repeating the same move, the same posture again and again and again.
Sometimes she did scream. Her father would wait patiently for the storm to expend itself, then begin again, as if there had been no outburst.
As a student, Narina had burned with frustration over the tempering of steel, over the meditation that dragged on and on while her minded darted here and there. She grew frustrated with stretching exercises, with muscle control, with listening skills. Even checking the bread ovens again and again to see if her loaves were ready had driven her to distraction. So much waiting, so much patience to learn. In comparison, Gyorgy’s impatience was a small thing, and easily understood by his teacher.
The storm within Narina had never gone away, not truly. But now, as a bladedancer sohn, it remained calm, only a whisper. The threat of violence from this man’s lips barely touched her. She drew a long breath through her nostrils and released it through her mouth before responding. When she finally responded, her words were calm, but carefully articulated and carrying an edge.
“You must be aware of what we do here, Miklos. What it means to be a sohn of the Divine School of the Twinned Blades, or as you call us, the bladedancers. But maybe you think because we prefer not to fight that we cannot do so when pushed.”
“I know you don’t want trouble.”
“So why did you bring it?”
“I told you already, this Stronghand villain—”
“Enough of that. The temple won’t break its agreement with Lord Balint, and you can’t take the weapons by force.”
“But I can. There’s something you don’t know, woman—I’m aware of your situation. Most of your men and women are high in the mountains, shearing sheep and cutting wood. Two more are on the post road, a day or two at least by foot into the mountains. They are on their way to Dimetroso, where two more of your fraters, plus your sister, are negotiating with the crowlord of the city for a shipment of iron sand.”
This was more or less true, although by now her sister should be finished with her negotiations and well on her way back to the temple. More alarming was how Miklos had come by this information.
“How would you know that?”
“Closer at hand, you have a handful of elders chopping wood and tending vegetable patches. Great warriors in their day, maybe, but age brings every man to his knees eventually. What good would they be with a sword?”
“More than you might suppose.”
“That leaves you and this boy.”
“And you think that you could. . .?” She shrugged. “Against either one of us?”
Miklos gave a sly sort of smile, as if he’d been holding onto some great secret, although Narina already guessed what he was going to say.
“I probably couldn’t, not alone, although, I don’t know. . .I’ve always wondered how much of your reputation is earned and how much is mystical nonsense. It would be interesting to find out.”
“Please don’t test me.”
“But I didn’t come by myself. There are sixty of my lord’s warriors on this hillside. Zoltan’s best men. While we’ve been talking, they’ve been creeping up to your armory.”
Miklos removed a small whistle that had been tucked between his belt and his leather breastplate and gave it two short blasts.
Gyorgy drew a sharp breath. He’d pushed up close to Narina. Too close, in fact; she needed to remind him about range of motion and how to position himself relative to another bladedancer during a fight. Not that she expected it to come to that. Not with Miklos.
“It’s a signal,” the boy said, tone accusing. “He’s warning someone.”
Miklos gave a little shrug. “We didn’t come to an agreement. What else was I to do?”
“So what, your men are intending to fall upon the armory and take Balint’s weapons by force?” Narina asked. “Please advise them to stop whatever they’re doing. My father is up there, meditating at the shrine. Close enough to reach the armory in a moment.”
“Sixty warriors against one old man. That’s it, isn’t it? Your father, seventy-whatever-it-is years old, against my liege’s finest men. If he knows what’s good for him, he’ll hand them over without fuss.”
“My father knows they’re coming already. He’ll be prepared.”
Miklos snorted at this. “And how would he know that?”
“The same way I knew you were approaching my forge. I had time to leave my work, strap on my swords, and wait for you. To see what your intentions were. My father is the temple master. He heard you and your men before I did. Even if he’d been asleep, he’d have sensed their auras.”
“I have a father, too,” Miklos said. “He’s the same age as yours, half-deaf and befuddled. I know what old men are like. If your father was a great warrior once, those days are long gone. Now listen to me. I can give one last signal, tell the men to stand down, but only if you agree to give me—give Lord Zoltan—those weapons. You’ll be stopping a wicked fool in Balint Stronghand, and preventing a larger war.”
“And if you tell your men to stand down, I’m willing to offer a demonstration to prove that stealing the weapons is impossible.”
“Woman, you are a fool. Very well, what’s done is done. Remember that I tried to be reasonable.”
Miklos bega
n to back away, as if to vanish down the path, or perhaps follow his men up the hillside to supervise the theft of the temple weapons.
Narina held up a hand. “Wait. We’ll see how this turns out.”
His eyes narrowed. “How do you mean?”
“We’ll know the results soon enough. Just wait.” She nodded at the boy. “Gyorgy, go into the smithy. Return your blade core to the scrap and begin afresh.”
Gyorgy raised an eyebrow. He cast a look at the interloper, who returned the whistle to his belt, crossed a pair of muscular arms in front of his chest, and stared hard at Narina. Next, the boy glanced back at the forge, where he’d left the previous blade across the anvil. Finally, he gave a long look at the path that led up to the armory, the temple quarters, the shrine, and the gardens and mill.
Her student was doubting her. Very well; this would be a demonstration for the both of them.
“Gyorgy. . .”
The boy returned to the shed. Moments later, the bellows huffed as the boy heated a fresh piece of steel. While he worked, Narina walked to the edge of the stream. A series of bamboo tubes siphoned water from the main channel and dumped it into four barrels. The first barrel sat next to the forge, and was used to quench blades.
The next one was for drinking, followed by one for washing hands and face, and finally, a large barrel for bathing. The bladedancers weren’t firewalkers, who seemed impervious to either cold or heat, and she greatly preferred soaking in the heated basins up at the baths, even apart from their meditative qualities. But she’d bathed in that cold barrel dozens of times, first as a student, and now as a sohn.
She wished she had time for a bath now, to strengthen her sowen. Instead, she settled for a quick splash from one of the smaller barrels.
The grass next to the channel was still wet from the rain earlier in the day, and so she dropped to a crouch instead of sitting, and stared at the flowing stream. The sound of water trickling into the barrels and then draining back into the channel soothed her, as did the bubbling brook itself. She turned her thoughts to her father.
If attacked, Sohn Joskasef would want to avoid fighting within the armory itself, which was a small room on the side of the sawmill. The confines would limit his range of motion, and a bladedancer’s greatest risk when fighting an untrained enemy was confinement. Too many spears and sword thrusts in too small a space to avoid them all, even with the finely honed skills and techniques that a sohn brought to bear.
Instead, he would shift the fight to the flat ground next to the stream and in front of the water wheel that turned the saws in the mill. At this very moment he was likely next to the water that was running down the hillside to this very spot, as this small channel divided off from the main stream above. Was Father even now warning the attackers to ignore their orders and return to their captain? Or had the fighting already begun?
“This is absurd!” Miklos burst out. The man moved about to her rear, but she sensed his footsteps and could tell he was only pacing in agitation and not physically threatening her. “You can still stop this!”
“Be quiet and wait. We’ll know soon enough if it has been stopped or not.”
He fell silent, but didn’t stop the pacing. He kept moving back and forth, and once moved toward the path, perhaps deciding to flee the scene after all. Narina decided to let him, but then he turned around and began his pacing again. Gyorgy carried the hot steel to the anvil and began to hammer it into shape. Considering the distraction, and that his teacher wasn’t marking strokes next to him, the young man’s work seemed surprisingly centered.
The brook clouded. A faint tint at first, and then the water grew progressively darker.
Narina sighed. “Here it is, Miklos, the answer to your question.”
“You’ve changed your mind? Is that what it is?”
“I’d hoped my father would succeed with your men where I’d failed, but apparently not. Look at the water,” she added when he arrived to peer over her shoulder.
“What am I looking at? I don’t—” His voice fell silent as the water continued to darken.
“It’s the blood of your men, Miklos. They’re dying and falling into the millrace.”
“Impossible. It’s some sort of trick.” He turned with a jerk and made toward the path leading up to the armory.
“Go that way and you’ll die, too,” she said.
He stopped abruptly when he reached the first of the stone stairs that led up from the smithy, but it wasn’t at her warning. Instead, a man came staggering out of the woods from above. He held his hand across his throat, and blood trickled through his knuckles. More blood streamed from a gash in his arm, and again from his leather breastplate, which hung in tatters. He tried to say something, but the words came out in a gurgle, and he fell at Miklos’s feet. Miklos bent over him with a cry.
Several more men came stumbling after the first. One man, pale faced with shock and pain, clutched a torn bit of tunic over a bloody stump where his hand had been cut off. Another bled so heavily from his leg that Narina was surprised that he’d managed to make it this far. Two others suffered less severe wounds, and the final man was missing part of his scalp, as if he’d ducked beneath a flashing sword just in time to avoid losing his entire head. The wound was grisly, but the least severe of the half dozen who’d made it down the staircase from above.
“Where are the rest?” Miklos demanded.
The man with the severed scalp wiped a forearm across his eyes to clear away the blood dripping into them. “Dead. All of them cut down. It was so fast.”
“An ambush?”
“The old man, he. . .I don’t know. He was everywhere. Maybe there was more than one.”
“No,” another man said in a rasp. “There was only the one.”
“It’s impossible,” Miklos said. Once again, his hand went to his chest and he winced. “He couldn’t have been alone. Not to have done. . .this.”
“I’m surprised any of them survived,” Narina said. She rose to her feet with a heavy sort of sorrow in her breast to see so much waste, so much unnecessary suffering. Miklos’s surviving companions looked at her in terror. “Once a sohn begins his dance, there is little to stop him. But as you said, my father is an old man. Perhaps he tired and let these ones go.”
Miklos stared at her, face blank, then looked back at his wounded men, who were gasping, bleeding, needing help staunching wounds. When he turned back to her, a dark fury had come over his features. He drew his sword with a snarl. The muscles in his arms and shoulders bulged as he held up the massive weapon.
Narina’s swords were in her hands. She didn’t remember drawing them.
“Be very sure of what you are doing, Miklos,” she said softly. “You can come at me and die, or you can see to your men. They won’t get care here, but you can still save some of their lives if you leave at once.”
Very slowly, hands trembling, he sheathed his sword once more.
“Tell your master what happened here,” she said. “And tell him that he will receive no temple weapons from us or the other schools. Now go.”
Miklos and the man with the gashed, bloody scalp helped the more severely injured survivors across the clearing in front of the smithy. None of them took their eyes off Narina, who slowly sheathed her weapons. They vibrated in their sheaths, as if anxious to kill now that she’d awakened them. The demon blade was especially eager, and would have drank Miklos’s blood with the merest flick of the wrist. She willed down the singing in her temples that she’d called up the moment she’d drawn the weapons.
Miklos turned one last time as he made to vanish down the path toward the post road. “You’ve made a terrible mistake. You’ll see that soon enough.”
And then he was gone.
Chapter Five
“Enough with the hammering, Gyorgy,” Narina said when Miklos and his men had left. “You’ve lost the rhythm anyway.”
He stopped abruptly and let out a nervous chuckle. “You thought I’d hold my conc
entration through that?”
“A challenge for anyone,” she admitted. “But there’s no better time to focus your sowen than a moment of heightened emotion. Some day you may be called on to focus it when arrows are raining down on your head and a man on a horse is bearing down with his spear pointed at your heart.”
“One of the elders told me that Master Joskasef was capable of defeating an entire band of warriors.” Gyorgy’s voice was still full of wonder. “But people tell stories—I wasn’t sure it was true.”
“Who told you that? Kozmer?”
“Aye. Said the master could have been a sword saint.”
“As close to one as you’ll find in this benighted age,” Narina agreed. “My father’s old now—most of that strength is gone, though there’s nothing wrong with his sowen—but it doesn’t really matter. Even as he is, Miklos’s men had no chance.”
“I didn’t quite know what to expect. I’ve never seen anything but training.”
“Neither have I. Nobody else has been foolish enough to challenge us—at least not since I was a child. The last time our people fought in the plains was before I was born.”
“Maybe that’s why Miklos thought the master was weak,” Gyorgy said. “He thought they were just stories.”
“But a crowlord should know better, even if his captain doesn’t,” she said. “So what, by all the fiery demons, inspired Zoltan to throw away the lives of dozens of his best men?”
“Is he sanctioned now? Will we punish him somehow?”
“That’s for my father to decide.”
Narina looked around. The pine trees surrounding the clearing still waved gently in the warm summer breeze, and the water in its little channel had run clear again. But the memory of violence would linger here. The barrels would need to be emptied and cleaned with sand and a wire brush before they’d be pure enough for drinking or bathing. And the auras would remain disturbed for some time.
It would be even worse up above, where the dead had fallen, and with most of the temple absent, it fell on her and Gyorgy to clean up the mess around the armory and the mill while her father bathed and meditated. She told the boy to return his work to the shed, damp the fire, and arrange the tools while she kicked pine needles over the blood patches in the ground where the wounded had staggered through.
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