by Billy Wong
"Y-you monster!" her first opponent cried shakily.
"What did you call me? It's you two who came after me; you should have expected to lose your lives."
"You killed them all, killed his brothers like it was nothing! They were triplets, like part of the same being! And now you've killed him... they were my only friends. Die!" He thrust himself up off the ground, swinging his sword.
For a moment, Rose felt a pang of regret at the sight of his grief. Then, she remembered who he must have been talking about, and felled him with a quick sidestep and gutting slash. "Your friends were raping little boys. They deserved everything they got, and you're a fool for fighting for their sake."
Continuing her trip, she was attacked twice more by probable friends or allies of the fiendish men she'd killed at Praith. Now she understood why Michael hadn't wanted her staying with his group. The fights didn't give her any satisfaction now, as she could not know whether all of these men had condoned their dead comrades' acts, or if they were only driven to vengeance by love for their fallen friends or kin.
Still, she killed nearly every enemy she faced and drove the rest into flight, but took deep slices to her arm and chest in the last, worst ambush. Particularly bothersome was the cut just above her left elbow; it hurt to bend her arm, and she knew that would make wielding her shield difficult.
Rose arrived in view of Gustrone, and even now couldn't hold back a smile when she laid eyes upon the great walls looming like a god's shields around the city. At close range, the walls stretched as far as her eye could see, and she wondered how much time and how many men it had taken to build them. Surely, it would have been difficult getting the massive stone blocks in place, though she could see it had been worth it. The legends said that Gustrone had never fallen to invasion, and she believed it. What could breach those walls?
Walking through the thick iron gate, she could already see the gigantic castle which housed the throne of Kayland at the heart of the city. Her eyes widened at the sight. Even the walls paled in comparison to its grandeur; while they'd been immense, they were still only walls. But the castle was a building, a complex structure, and larger and more intricate than any she'd seen before. It must have been hundreds of feet wide to dominate the landscape as it did, and sprouted towers that nearly touched the sky between which slender, elegant bridges lay. A vast moat surrounded the palace, and spikes topped its battlements. For all Rose saw, it would have been nearly impossible to take.
First, she sent Lise a letter which warned her it would be a while before any more money came in. She might not have an easy time finding a new job with the infamy she would gain from her recent slaughter of her allies, but right now she didn't care. Last she checked, her father was no longer in grave danger to his life, and while Lise still wanted her to keep the money flowing, Rose had other priorities at the moment.
Heading for the castle, she walked over the long drawbridge and was promptly stopped by a pair of guards dressed in bright polished armor. "What business do you have here?" one of them asked with a contemptuous look at her dirty form.
"I have to see the king. There's been some terrible things happening in central Kayland."
"So you want an audience with him, then?"
"Yes..."
"You'll have to come back tomorrow. Today's forum is over."
Okay. Rose seriously needed sleep, anyway. She went to the nearest inn, tried to get to get a room, and found herself lacking the necessary funds. So she looked around some more, until she found a dark, crowded basement of a hostel where she stayed the night.
The next morning, she returned to the castle and took her place at the back of a line reaching far outside the building itself. Already? She didn't think she'd woken up so late. By the time she was nearly inside, the guards announced that the king would not be taking any more common visitors for the day and dismissed everyone left on the line. Now she was getting frustrated. Standing for so long had done her wounded body no favors, and it irked her to have gained nothing for it.
Rose came back even earlier the next day, only to find a still long, if less discouragingly so, line. But after a while, she saw that the line was moving slower as well, and grew worried she once again wouldn't make it inside. She had begun considering doing something that would surely amount to no good—that is, cutting in line—when she entered just in time.
As she crossed the marble floor to approach the throne, she listened to her fellow supplicants and tried to figure out the proper way to address the king. But ranging from peasant farmers to professional scholars, they spoke in all sorts of ways, and Rose could hardly determine whose example she should follow. And suddenly, she was standing before King Benedict.
He was a broad-shouldered, gray-bearded man in his fifties, and with the finery of his silk and ermine robes looked to Rose more like a merchant than a king. The image she'd always held in her mind of a great ruler was that of a warrior like herself, mightily clad in steel and bearing arms. Still, she'd rarely heard much in the way of criticism of the king.
"And what is your concern, warrior?" he asked, acknowledging the martial status indicated by her battered chain mail.
She tried to sound confident. "Your Majesty, there's been terrible things going on in Nienne, Count Lennox's territory. He hires mercenaries to keep his disgruntled subjects in check, and condones the worst of atrocities on their part in order to cow their victims into submission. It's got to be stopped."
Benedict raised his eyebrows. "What sort of atrocities might these be?"
She shivered at the memory of all she'd seen. "Kidnapping, rape, murder, you name it, and on innocents besides."
"These are some very serious charges. But it sounds to me more that the mercenaries themselves would be to blame, not Count Lennox himself."
"But he encourages them to do this!"
"Really?"
Benedict's voice held genuine doubt, and Rose wasn't surprised he didn't fully trust a common girl like herself. But she'd seen for herself the evidence of Lennox's evil. "Yes, really."
"I'll have a talk with him."
A talk? She was almost sure the count would be able to worm his way out of trouble, if no one else came forth to unveil his lies. But Benedict's words were as much as she could have hoped for. "Thank you, Your Majesty."
She had begun to walk away when he stopped her. "Wait. What's your name, again?"
"Rose Agen, of Hullel. Nothing more than a humble... former sellsword."
"I've heard of you. Aren't you the crazed warrior who killed a third of your fellow mercenaries after the battle of Praith?"
Her hand brushed the hilt of her sword as fear she would be taken prisoner and executed quickened her heart. She knew she wouldn't be able to defeat the entire palace guard, but she wasn't going down without a fight. Forcing herself not to draw just yet, she said, "They had to be stopped. They were destroying innocent lives, and would have continued if not for me."
Benedict smiled, and some of the tension in her drained away. "So the rumors do not lie in painting you in a good light."
"They what?"
"People are calling you a hero. One bright child even asked me to give you a medal, just a day ago."
That quickly, huh? Of course, she didn't deserve the honor. She had hardly acted quickly enough, and what good she'd done hadn't made up for her past failings in her eyes. But at least she had done something this time. "I'm just thankful I could do a little bit. But I'm not strong enough to stop Count Lennox—you're the only one who can really save the people suffering under his reign."
Benedict didn't confirm that he would act one way or another, but said, "You're a good woman, Rose. If only there were more people like you in the world. Take care, brave warrior."
She thanked him again and left, her heart swelling just a bit with pride. The king liked her! Maybe her life wasn't meant to be hell forever, after all. Even her cloud had to have its silver lining.
#
Deciding not t
o go back to Seil for fear of meeting too many old allies, Rose instead stayed in Gustrone and tried to find work there. Despite the initial challenges of getting prospective employers to look past her sex, to her surprise she found her great strength and battle prowess easy sells, and soon began her career as a bodyguard. The work of a sellsword was not, as it turned out, for her.
For weeks she kept an ear out for news of Count Lennox while she worked, hoping to hear he would pay for his crimes. But all she ever found out was that Benedict had indeed had a warning talk with him about his "rumored" misdeeds. Since then, there had been fewer complaints from Nienne, but Rose wasn't totally convinced anything had really changed—except maybe that Lennox was getting better at hiding his sins. As much favor as the king had shown her, it might not amount to much help.
Though Rose knew there really wasn't much she could do about it, she decided to visit Nienne and see how things were going, and again informed her parents of her break from steady work. She spent a few days speaking with the locals, and found that things were just as bad as she'd feared. The count now threatened to kill anyone who complained about his rule, a good way to ensure their silence. Lennox had to be stopped, and Rose was going to do it no matter how impossible it seemed.
She tried at first to talk to the people and rally them to revolt, but they would not be easily convinced, and she realized that even if they had wanted to fight, it would almost surely be a futile effort. Untrained, underequipped angry peasants would not hold up well against real troops. So Rose decided to go it alone, resolving that she would find some way to catch this Lennox off guard and kill him. It would be difficult and dangerous, she knew, but someone had to do it.
Rose ran into trouble on her very first attempt to study the daily activities around Lennox's estate. Wandering around its fringes in a cloak meant to pass her off as any old hermit, she was stopped by a deeply tanned armsman in a rusty breastplate. "What are you doing snooping around here?"
She realized then that she hadn't exactly prepared herself to talk her way out of such a jam. She tried anyway, putting on her best old hag voice. "Just looking for mushrooms," she croaked.
"Your voice sounds kind of funny."
"Whatever do you mean?"
He tried to grab her hood, and she dodged out of the way. "Stay still! What the hell are you up to?"
"Don't touch. It's not proper to touch an old widow like me."
"You don't sound that old. You sound like a young woman pretending to be old!"
Ugh, why did he have to be so smart? Rose started to back away, and he drew his crossbow. It was already too late to salvage her disguise, but just then a strong gust of wind blew back her hood, revealing her face. The guard didn't seem to recognize her, but it was obvious she had been lying. He aimed at her heart and fired.
Rose drew her sword in a flash and sliced the crossbow bolt out of the air, cleaving it in half. She silently thanked Alicia for the little trick the merc had shown her, though she'd had to adjust it a bit for use with a sword. Her opponent stared for a moment, then drew his longsword and rushed, shouting for help. The fight was over in moments, Rose able to summon the same focus she'd felt at Praith. She killed her opponent in two short blows, one to knock aside his blocking blade and one to cut open his face. Unfortunately, three more were already on the way.
She charged them, brushing aside one of their bolts with the shield she withdrew from beneath her cloak while the other two shot wide. They met, and Rose's sword cut through an armsman's blade to smash his collarbone. Badly wounded, he was out of the fight, and her shield drove the breath from a bulky chest to put a second man down for a moment's time. She slew the third with a thrust into his gut, then killed the last soldier as he sat up with a downward chop through the top of his helm.
Already, she could see more men running to join the fight, and though she wondered if perhaps she could take them as long as they came in such staggered numbers, she decided not to take the risk. Better to allow herself the advantage of surprise. She turned and ran, slipping away in the forest surrounding the estate while she fumed over the inadvertent warning she'd given Count Lennox.
#
The results of her endeavor turned out even worse than Rose anticipated. As she listened in on a hunting armsman's words the next day, she learned that Lennox had ordered his attacker dragged out of hiding from whichever nearby village she was holed up in. But she'd been living in the wilderness all this time! She couldn't meet him to deny his suspicions, though, and turning herself in to stop his abusive searches was out of the question. She was just going to have to finish this. She decided then to take him in the next village he would visit, knowing he would be less well defended away from home.
She tracked his party of himself and eight bodyguards from his home to the village of Jaid, and waited for night. Then she fell upon his shelter in the inn, and shed blood yet another time. With a blade in each hand, she killed his two wakeful bodyguards before any of the rest could fully awake, and two more as they tried to rise. She would have gotten more if one particularly alert man did not grab her about the leg, but she threw her dagger into his neck, dislodging him, and took up her shield in its place. Four on one, now. She made it three by killing a groggy man having trouble freeing his sword from its sheath, then the remaining two bodyguards rushed her at once.
They were better than the bulk of the foes she'd faced, except the bandits at the riverside, and one of them hacked through her chain shirt to rip a gash in her side. The other cut her on the hand, and she almost dropped her sword. But she drove the rim of her shield like a steely punch into a man's mouth, and teeth shattered as his jaw gave way. He fell cradling his face in pain—and things grew worse, as Count Lennox replaced his fallen man.
Now Rose found herself pitted against a foe seemingly a match for her in every way, strong and fast and more skilled than anyone she'd fought before. Tall and broad of shoulder, his spear gave him a good advantage in reach. Worse, he had help, and that was always a bad thing.
She tried to negate that aid by killing it, but the last bodyguard was a savvy fighter in his own right, and backpedaled as she tried to launch a frenzied assault his way. A few strokes of her sword might have reached him, if only they were not parried by Lennox's great spear. And then the bodyguard was back, joining his master in a joint attack which opened wound after wound on Rose's body.
She stumbled backwards out of the large bedroom, counting on the doorway to allow her a shot at one man at a time. It worked, to a degree; Lennox came out first, and she battered him with a wild flurry of slashes at close range, cutting into his unarmored flesh several times. He fell back, allowing his bodyguard to take his place.
That man fared even worse, and Rose almost killed him, slicing him deeply on the thigh and belly as he backed away. But Lennox charged in low and thrust up at a strange angle with his spear, and she could not react in time. The wicked head, serrated like a steel shark's tooth, drove deep into her side. She screamed in agony.
Ignoring his wounded bodyguard's cries of pain, Lennox said, "Looks like I've killed another foe. Too bad; you could have been quite something, if I'd allowed you the life."
Impaled as she was, Rose was held out of sword's reach from her opponent, and could not get any closer without running herself fully through on the spear. The hall was also too narrow for her to free herself simply by backing away, and of course she was in incredible pain. But while the wound would have stolen most any other warrior's strength, Rose's peerless constitution did not fail her, and still able to think clearly she made a painful decision. Chopping down hard with her sword, she broke the spearshaft. She sprang forward as Lennox recoiled in shock, cutting him from his shoulder to the bottom of his ribcage.
Clutching at the huge wound down his body, Lennox moaned and turned to flee. Blood dripped to the ground as he lurched towards the window. Rose limped after him, but the last upright bodyguard pushed himself off the wall against which he'd been leaning to
block her path. He stabbed at her face, and wounded as she was, she could barely move to dodge. The blade grazed her chin as she leaned aside, but she made him pay, severing his arm at the shoulder. He fell with blood spraying between his dying fingers. Rose followed Lennox's crimson trail to the window. But when she looked outside, she could not see where he had gone.
Gazing down at the spear in her side, Rose sighed and sat on the floor. She hurt terribly, but expected to live; she had survived greater pains. At least she hadn't been run through again. Was she supposed to pull the damn spear out, or leave it in until she could get aid? The latter would probably have been a better idea under normal circumstances, but she wasn't sure when she would be able to find help around here. So she ripped it out with a hoarse yell of pain, bound her wound, and went on her way.
#
Leaving the inn through the front door where a ring of staring townspeople waited, Rose cursed herself for her failure. While she had won the fight, Lennox was still alive, and might now treat his people even more cruelly as "punishment" for allowing her to come so close to bringing him down. She needed to finish it. But she was not sure she had the strength left to do so, her limbs increasingly heavy as she continued to bleed. Somehow, though, she'd make herself try.
To her surprise, she heard a shout of "Rose!" and picked out the young man who had voiced it. She caught another cry of her name, which she realized came from elsewhere around her. It was only a small crowd around her, but small or not, they were cheering for her.
"How do you know my name?" she asked dumbly, too shaken to think about it herself.
A boy just a little older than herself replied, "He's been looking for you, using your name. So of course we know. You are her, right? The criminal?"
