Silk & Steel

by Ellen Kushner

  Nobody was. Either the boys who’d hired her weren’t there, or they were chicken. It didn’t matter to Angwar Bec. This was her fight. She had the contract, and the Court of Honor would uphold it.

  The duchess nodded. The entire courtyard was still. A few people were muttering amongst themselves, but nobody moved.

  Angwar Bec had a sudden, horrible thought: What if the duchess did not take her challenge? Tremontaine surely had house swordsmen, men of skill and experience, one of whom would be happy to step up, claim the fight, and dispatch the intruder. She wouldn’t stand a chance. She would depart this life with her name unknown, never having tasted those little filled pastries with the red and white squiggles on top.

  But the young Duchess Tremontaine spoke the formal words herself: “The accusation is false as air, false as the tongues that spoke it. I accept the challenge.”

  Someone screamed. Her guests had come for a pleasant evening of music, nibbles, and conversation, not to see their hostess covered in gore. But there was also an undercurrent of excitement on the air. Angwar Bec felt it like lightning, like power: the men all ready for a fight, eager to see two women attack each other, already weighing up the odds and passing their bets; the women, some of them very knowledgeable followers of the city’s duelists, thrilled at the novelty of this.

  “What are the terms?” the duchess asked.

  “To first blood,” said Angwar Bec.

  “Very well.” The duchess unpinned the capelet that covered her shoulders, letting it fall to the ground. She called for a maid to divest her of the rest of the brocade infrastructure, to unlace her skirt and her gilded bodice, and finally stood glowing in the firelight, strong and compact, in enough fine linen underthings still to keep her from the cold. Only her long brown hair remained up in its elaborate twists and bindings.

  An attendant came running from the house with a sturdy leather vest and gloves, while another brought the Duchess Katherine’s own rapier.

  Angwar Bec was impressed to see that the weapon was heavy and serviceable, not just a noble’s jewel. Until this moment, she hadn’t truly believed the stories of the lady who had fought real challenges against her peers on the Hill, and even studied, it was said, with the great St Vier. But when Katherine, Duchess Tremontaine, took sword in hand and assumed the stance, it was clear that it was all true.

  Angwar Bec was pleased to see that the duchess did not bother beginning with the little fiddle-faddles that some people did, twirling and swirling the tip of their blade as though they were trying to draw flowers in the air, or follow the flight of a bumble bee. Such tricks were just for show; no serious opponent ever fell for them. In return she showed her respect for the duchess’s swordsmanship by not trying them out on her, either, even though Angwar Bec’s wrist and fine point control were some of her best skills. They’d do their work for her later.

  But when, she wondered as they circled the courtyard, was later?

  On the streets of Riverside, Angwar Bec had fought serious and sudden duels, the kind where speed mattered more than style, and the goal was to put your opponent out of commission before they could do the same to you.

  That was not her purpose here. She had an audience here. Half the nobles of the city were now evaluating her technique, commenting on her style as they watched her circle the courtyard with just a couple of lengths of razor-sharp steel between herself and Katherine, Duchess Tremontaine. These were not practice blades. She knew how sharp her own was, and while the duchess’s had probably not been honed that very afternoon, neither was it likely to be dull.

  So when she had her opponent’s measure, would Angwar Bec really lunge at the flesh under the white sleeve or the unprotected calf, penetrating the outer layer of cloth and skin to draw noble blood? The thought made her clench her jaw, so that her shoulder tightened and her arm lost its flex.

  Oh, why in the Green God’s name had she been such a fool as to accept a gig like this for her very first paid and public fight? There was no way that it was going to end without her looking like either an incompetent blade or a Johnny-Go-Mad. If she lost, it was the end of her not-quite-started career as a sword for hire. If she won....

  If she won, she knew where it would place her. She’d be typecast as a duelist assassin from the beginning, her only gigs coming from nobles seeking to draw other nobles’ blood. No well-paid, elegant show duels against other fine blades for her, just revenge jobs to the death until a better sword put an end to her.

  Angwar Bec was not going to put a scratch on the noble Katherine, Duchess Tremontaine, not if she could help it.

  The noble Katherine came in right past her guard in a beautifully fluid motion, which Angwar Bec’s stiff arm was slow to parry. She had to fall back, giving ground like a tyro. And the duchess let her. Katherine could have followed up immediately, could have won the bout then and there, but she did not, and it was clear that she did not. Clear to Angwar Bec, anyway, alert to the nuance of the tiniest fraction of speed, of breath, things invisible to the onlookers, who believed they saw two experienced fighters dueling at the top of their bent, fighting to win.

  As Katherine let her regain her stance, it came to Angwar Bec in a flash that it did not matter to the duchess whether she won or lost. There was, after all, nothing really at stake for her. Her losing the fight would give the noble boys, Angwar Bec’s silly patrons, some notoriety if they chose to boast about it, which they surely would. But it would not affect the Duchess Tremontaine. Everyone knew she was not really a man. Even above the padded fighting vest that hid her figure, her face was smooth, her taut, elegant jawline gently rounded, as a man’s would never be. As her breath came more and more quickly, her lips parted to release the occasional grunt of effort in a woman’s unmistakable treble.

  What was her game? Angwar Bec wondered. Was she just trying to show her guests a good time, not to end the entertaining bout too quickly? The duchess pressed her advantage, pushing Angwar Bec back across the yard. Was Katherine, in fact, simply the better fighter?

  Fuck that, Angwar Bec thought. The Duchess Katherine knew the basics. She was skilled at the slow game, the careful and deliberate work of the practice studio. She had technique. What she didn’t have was fire. She had probably never fought to the death, never in her life.

  Angwar Bec had fire. She had the will to win, and a skill born of more than mere technique. It was time to show the Duchess Tremontaine what she was up against.

  The flurry of Angwar Bec’s attack was a glory to behold. The guests cheered as Katherine met her thrusts with parries, ripostes that Angwar Bec returned in kind, in a blur of movement. She decided to show off with a twist around her back, a flashy move that still kept herself guarded. And she heard the duchess laugh with delight.

  They made their way around the bonfire, to the calls and screams of Tremontaine’s guests. The duchess’s breath was coming shorter now, her steps a little slower.

  A trickle of sweat rolled down Katherine’s cheek. Angwar Bec gave her the tiny moment she needed to brush at it with one wrist while the other held off her opponent. The duchess grinned her thanks. Her parted lips were a very becoming rose.

  The duelists went around a particularly weird and annoying cornice by the stairs into the house. Not knowing the terrain left the young blade at a disadvantage. She stumbled badly against the plinth along the foot of the wall, but never dropped her guard. And the Duchess Katherine patiently played her out, running through a very basic thrust for her to parry and riposte, while she got her feet back under her and was able once more to advance out of the shadows.

  With no idea what had just happened, the guests were hooting their approbation of their hostess’s presumed triumph.

  But Angwar Bec was beginning to have some idea of the Duchess Katherine’s game.

  There, in the shadows, she spiraled her blade around the other woman’s, sliding them both up until their faces nearly touched.

  “Hello,” Katherine said softly. “Have you noticed
my weakness at defending from high right yet?”

  And Angwar Bec understood that the Duchess Tremontaine was not planning to defeat an unknown young sword in her own courtyard, here in front of her noble friends. The lady was unwilling to throw the fight, but she was patiently waiting for Angwar Bec to defeat her.

  “I’m about to,” Angwar Bec replied, which was really all she could do, given the brightness of the other woman’s eye, the exceptional flush of her cheek, and the sharp aroma of her breath.

  “Let’s make your reputation now, shall we?”

  And that, the young sword thought as she moved in for the definitive touch and disarm that later became her trademark, is what made a true noble. Knowing that you’d eat tomorrow, whether you won or lost your next bout. And that your opponent might not.

  * * *

  That night, in bed with the Duchess Tremontaine, Angwar Bec began her discovery of what it meant to be a success.

  Katherine fed her cake after sweet cake. Bec ever after associated the taste of anise with the taste of Katherine’s skin, the chocolate crushed in her fragrant armpit, the raspberry dipped in her navel. The tang of her hard kisses had a flavor of their own.

  But she found she liked the chestnut best.

  Danger Noodle

  by S.K. Terentiev

  “Earth to Jane...?” Sophia held out a bloody chunk of goat, squatting with her purple galoshes bright in the mud. “Liver.”

  She waved the gobbet of goat at me impatiently and I extended the specimen bag. I waited until after she’d turned back to eviscerating—pardon me, autopsying—her goat of choice before sticking my tongue out at her. “Earth to Jane” my ass.

  Goats. Why did it have to be goats?

  It’s not that I’m afraid—I’m an insurance adjuster working non-standard insurance. I’d been on this rodeo too long to be freaked out by a few goats. It’s just their eyes are so creepy, rectangle pupils like tiny mail slots into their brains. The fact that the whole herd was wide-eyed dead around us in the pasture didn’t exactly help.

  “So what do we think?” I dropped the bag into the cooler at my feet and snagged another one from the kit.

  “We don’t think anything. We are still investigating.”

  I took a deep breath instead of snapping back at her. I’d brought this on myself with the whole anniversary thing; I couldn’t exactly blame her for being upset.

  “Babes, can we talk about this?”

  “It’s fine.” She shoved another bit of goat into the bag I held out.

  Yeah, pretty sure it wasn’t fine.

  “Today’s not over—”

  “Can we just focus on the job, please?”

  “Okay... sure.” I handed her a swab. “So what do you think happened?”

  “I don’t want to speculate.”

  “Since when?”

  She sighed. “I have a few hypotheses but no theories. There’s not much to go on.”

  That was putting it mildly. We were in the bottom corner of the pasture, nestled up against the fence. The whole herd was sprawled around us without a mark on them, like a caprine sleepover gone wrong. Clouds rumbled overhead but so far the rain had held off, and everything was the muddy gray and green of a Texas February. The only real spots of color were orange construction cones along the road and our SOTCO Insurance van, which was currently Neon Frog’s Ass green.

  Sophia wasn’t a mage with a capital M, but she had enough juice that the van had developed an affinity for her, which manifested in its being a giant mood ring on wheels. From the color, she was at DEFCON Three.

  Which meant I’d annoyed her enough to knock her off her game. Knowing her, she was going round and round in her head over what I’d done—or hadn’t done. Completely distracted and more frustrated by the minute.

  “The fact that the scene’s pretty clean means we can rule out things like run of the mill cult sacrifices or a werewolf on a bender, right?” I prompted, stripping off my gloves.

  “True...”

  She was definitely stuck. Time for a hard reset.

  “What about a botched fertility rite?” I mused as I crouched down and snagged a sprig of tiny yellow flowers from a weed, idly tucking it behind my ear. “Pan’s Pastures is a small dairy, but that kind of thing is right up the satyrs’ alley.”

  I knew a podunk operation like this one didn’t have the juice to funnel a whole herd’s life force—it’d be like trying to lasso a tornado with a wet noodle. If the satyrs crashed and burned on a fertility thing the whole area would look like Willy Wonka’s wet dream of a spring, instead of a handful of weeds in the brown grass. I also knew Sophia wouldn’t be able to resist.

  She snapped out of it, and I let her explanation of energy waves and quantum gravity wash over me as she went back to running the usual tests. We’d been together long enough that I’d heard it all before, but this was her jam, so I made the appropriate interested noises as I handed her swabs, a handful of dried jackalope kidneys, and various solutions in droppers.

  “Some kind of chemical residue here, but not a summoning,” Sophia sighed as the Fanta-orange liquid she was swirling with a bit of goat hair remained orange, instead of flashing to black like it should have if there were rift particles.

  Probably for the best. The paperwork on a minor god summoning would take hours, and I had plans for tonight.

  She capped the jar and stood, stretching the kinks out of her back. A head taller than me and willowy with a love of Pilates bordering on religion, her stretch was a work of art. Beauty and brains, she was the whole package.

  She caught me looking and gave me a Not Happening Today Look. The whole package with just enough snappiness to make life interesting.

  Her phone rang and she dropped an F-bomb before picking up.

  “Hello, Chad.”

  I winced. Chad was our new direct report and he’d been all up in our business since he came on board. Between that and Sophia’s mood it was going to be a fun conversation.

  I stifled a yawn. Good time for a coffee refill. Jane, exit stage left.

  Grabbing the kit, I headed to the van. I’d tossed and turned all night, too excited about this weekend to sleep. My first cold brew hadn’t stood a chance. Through the gate I leapt over the ditch, passing the cones marking the end of the storm-drain construction. They stood like orange sentinels below a Horny Toad Preserve 0.5 Mile sign, its cartoon lizard in a red cowboy hat pointing down the road.

  The sky rumbled again, and I dropped the kit in the front seat and grabbed my backup latte from the console. I downed half of it as the weather started misting and the wind picked up, blowing the smell of the poultry farm across the street into my face. Ah the country—mud, rain, and chicken shit.

  Snagging our ponchos from the glove compartment, I shut the door just as the van broke out into puce polka dots.

  Fuck.

  DEFCON Two.

  Sophia’s little chat with Chad must be going swimmingly, and she was well and truly pitching a fit. Which meant my ass was grass if I didn’t do something pretty damn quick.

  She was a professional, but with the van at Toad Ass she might nuke Chad through the phone and it’d be all my fault. Plus, if she blew a gasket the van would too, and we’d be stuck in nowheresville with a bunch of dead goats. Not exactly how I wanted to spend our anniversary.

  She hung up as I jogged back through the gate. I shook her poncho out like a low-rent matador as she bulled toward me, muttering under her breath. I caught something about Chad’s mom and sheep, but mostly it was unintelligible except for the occasional f-bomb.

  “Having fun, love?” I asked as she snatched the poncho from me and shoved it over her head.

  “He called me ‘babe’ and asked if we needed help. Twerp.”

  Yeah, I’d call that desk jockey for help when the next apocalypse was triggered and not a second before. I reached up and tugged her hood forward, tucking in her dark curls before holding her cheek in my palm.

  “You want
I should kill him?”

  She glowered at me, brown eyes almost black in the stormy light.

  “I will! Just say the word, I’m your huckleberry. I mean, sure, there’s the whole prison thing. And it’s Texas, so I’ll probably get the needle, but for you...”

  She snorted and leaned down to shut me up with a kiss.

  “Why Sophia Miller, what will Human Resources think?”

  “That you’re ridiculous and I need my head examined for agreeing to marry you.”

  “Technically, it was me who agreed to marry you.”

  She rolled her eyes but grinned as she took my coffee. “You’re still ridiculous.”

  “True.”

  “And I’m still mad at you.”

  I froze in the middle of pulling on my poncho, and she tugged it down off my face and met my eyes.

  I sighed. “Soph, you said you didn’t want to do anniversary presents. You said it multiple times.”

  “I know... but...”

  “You said, ‘We’re saving for the Galapagos trip in June, that’s enough of a present for me.’”

  She sipped the coffee and avoided my eyes.

  “I thought you meant it. I messed up and I’m so sorry, love.”

  “Oh, it’s okay.” She sighed. “You’re right, I did say we weren’t doing presents, so it’s not exactly fair to be mad at you for believing me.”

  “Note to self, stop believing Sophia. Got it.” I smiled at her. “Stick with me, ‘babe,’ the day’s still young. Who knows what could happen?”

  She made a face at me, then grinned. She could never stay mad for long... ’cause I got jokes.

  “Okay so what do we have?” I asked, taking my coffee back before she could hog it all.

  “Dead goats, chemical residue...”

  “What about the Goatman? Isn’t he local?”

  “The Lake Worth Monster?” Sophia scrolled in her phone. “His Instagram has him skiing in Colorado.”

  “I know there isn’t a mark on the herd but I gotta ask.” I held up my cup, the stylized chupacabra barista smiling from the Vintage Coffee logo. “Do you think it’s weird there’s a blood-drinking barista with a taste for goat only a couple miles away?”