The girl eyed him warily for a moment before she shuffled over to him. She offered him a leg and waited patiently as he knelt to unlock her restraints. Her knee came up in a flash and a slower man would probably have ended up with a broken nose. Shifting quickly to the side, he evaded the brunt of the blow meant to disable and instead took it in the side of the head. It rocked his skull and knocked his teeth together, but he had been hardened by far worse blows.
He sprang to his feet, pivoting away from her. Spinning on a heel, he brought his other leg around and slammed his boot into the top of her foot. She gave a satisfying scream and stumbled backwards. Another spinning kick caught her in the stomach, knocking the wind out of her in a rush. She crashed into the wall and slid to the floor, her eyes dull and glassy.
“I may be three decades your elder, little one, but I'm stronger, faster, and more agile than you. If you aim to kill me, you better practice your stealth and subterfuge. You are clumsy and you have no style. You're not even a worthy opponent. You fall easily and without effort. Hardly a challenge.”
The light returned to her eyes and she glared up at him, flashing a hand gesture in his direction that was better suited for brothels and taverns. If nothing else, he thought with a shake of his head, he had to respect her tenacity. She wasn't going to stop fighting him without being broken first, and until she learned to when not to fight, she wouldn't learn anything else.
“Do you want these?” he asked, holding the keys just out of her reach and jingling them. Mocking her with them.
She nodded.
“Then come get them.” He placed the keys on the table and stood, his arms crossed across his wide chest.
The girl pushed herself up, slowly sliding back up the wall to a standing position. She was still shackled, which was going to make any attack she made that much more difficult, but he wanted to see her try. There was a lot he could learn just by observing and it wasn't in her nature to back down. She would fail before she turned away from the fight. Royce was certain.
Her eyes flicked to the wall beside her and Royce tried to guess which weapon she'd grab first. Nearest to her hand was a long halberd, lying horizontally on the wall across its pegs. She hefted it experimentally and winced, but didn't cry out. Royce knew that pain well; he had felt it every day of his life.
There was a naturally occurring phenomenon that plagued all Quintessentialists, those who channeled the raw forces of magic. Mages could not wield weapons of iron or steel. Even close proximity to the metal was enough to disrupt their tenuous connection to the Quintessential Sphere; the realm of time and essence, from which all magic flowed. That disruption, like a fire in the blood, was quickly fatal to the Quintessentialist. In minutes, or hours, eating away at their mind until there was nothing left but an empty shell.
Royce was different, as had been his father, and his father before him. He was a swordmage, one who could wield a steel blade in one hand and the full power of the sphere in the other. It was a fearsomely powerful concordance of skills, but one that came at a terrible price. The disruption that came to all mages came also to the swordmage, it just came slower. A glacial crawl opposed to a flash freeze.
Tiadaria had that same skill. He had known it from the first time he touched her. The link-shock that coursed through their bodies when they touched was the power of the sphere dancing between them. Now she stood before him, learning to master the pain. He saw her knuckles go white and watched the tip of the wicked blade as it sliced a wide arc toward his mid-section.
At the apogee of its stroke, he took a single step back, neatly avoiding the slashing weapon. Her lips curled back against her teeth and he grinned at her, mocking her.
“Come child,” he teased. “Don't you come from the Frozen Frontier? I thought all the clansmen were fearsome fighters? Oh...but you're just a girl, and a baby at that. I guess I shouldn't expect you to put up much of a fight.”
Her eyes narrowed and Royce knew that his goading was getting to her. She was stubborn, and resourceful, but she lacked patience. Something that he could exploit and would get her killed if she wasn't careful.
Another swipe of the blade and another step back. This time, she didn't hesitate as she brought the blade back across their path. She was driving him back. She wanted him out of reach of the keys so she could snatch them up. Let her think she was succeeding, he thought. She'd have that much more to lose when she realized her error.
One final swipe of the blade brought her within arm’s reach of the keys and she dropped the halberd, lunging for the ring. As the weapon fell, Royce caught the shaft with the tip of his foot and flipped it up into his hand. Careful that his grip didn't slide down into the blade, he spun in a tight circle, slamming the pole into the small of her back and knocking her forward over the table. The keys spun out of her reach, sliding off the table and landing near the hearth.
Easily reversing the weapon, he advanced on her with malice in his eyes and a sneer of contempt twisting his lips. She rolled to one side, trying to avoid the tip of the blade as it came very near her unprotected face. She rolled until she was up against the wall and had nowhere to go. Stone on one side and steel on the other, she was well and truly trapped.
“Yield,” he demanded, pressing the tip of the blade against her throat.
“No,” she snarled and slid sideways, kicking up her legs and fouling the blade of the halberd in the chain of her shackles. Twisting the lower half of her body, she wrenched the weapon from his grasp. Momentarily free from threat, she snake-crawled toward the keys.
He let her get her hand within a few inches of the key ring before he seized her by the hair, putting a knee in the small of her back and the blade of his belt dagger to her exposed throat. He drew his blade across, ever so lightly, drawing a bead of blood that slipped under the blade of his knife and down the pale skin of her neck.
“Yield, little one, or die.” She was stubborn and full of vengeance, but she wasn’t stupid. Royce expected her to yield when she was bested and she did just that.
“I yield to you, Sir.”
The tension went out of her body and she went limp on the floor under him. He plucked up the keys and tucked them back in his pocket, then offered the girl his handkerchief, which she used to mop the blood from the superficial wound. He cleaned the blade on the leg of his pants and then slipped it back into its sheath.
“You have a certain amount of raw talent, girl. That move with the chains was brilliant. You need to learn to focus your anger, and you need to learn patience.”
She scowled at him but didn't answer. He sat down beside her, his back against the wall. They were almost shoulder to shoulder, but the few inches between them might as well have been the deepest crevasse on all of Solendrea.
“Can you teach me to fight like you do?” She finally asked, looking across the room, pointedly not meeting his cool regard.
“Not if you don't trust me,” he replied. It was an honest answer, if a complicated one. He could certainly teach her the techniques without her trust, but for her to live up to his expectations, to his plans, she would need to trust him implicitly.
“I don't,” she said quietly. “I can't.”
“I know.”
They sat in quiet contemplation for quite some time before Royce reached into his pocket and took out his keys. He offered them to her, hanging on one finger.
“How about we work on that? Starting right now?”
The look she gave him was plainly doubtful. Her eyes narrowed and Royce wondered if this vengeful creature would ever trust anyone about anything. “What’s the trick?”
Royce sighed. “There is no trick, little one. I’m offering you the opportunity to trust that when I say I’m going to do something, I do it.”
“What’s in it for you?”
“Not having to put up with quite as much of your nonsense, hopefully?”
The girl sat in contemplative silence for so long that Royce was certain that she was going to elect to
keep the shackles instead of trusting him. He really couldn’t blame her. She had no idea who he was or what he had done. To her, he was just another man looking to use her for his own nefarious purposes. He wanted to use her, Royce thought. That much was true. The nefarious part, that remained to be seen.
She reached out and took the keys from him. Her eyes never left his face. She watched him like a hawk until she managed to convince herself that he wasn’t going to strike out at her, and then she began searching to the key to the shackles. She found it in short order and freed herself of the restraints.
“Now,” Royce said, ignoring the girl’s reaction as she started at his firm tone. “You will assist me in getting this room put in order. It’s gotten out of control.”
To her credit, she paused only for a moment. “Yes, Sir.”
As he stood, Royce was overcome with a coughing fit so severe that it brought him to his knees. The girl hovered, indecisive, until he waved her off. His chest felt as if someone had filled it with hot coals. With an expansive gesture, he indicated the whole room.
“I need a moment,” he rasped as he labored to get to his feet. “You get started, and I’ll join you shortly.”
He quit the room without waiting for a reply. Tiadaria looked around. Piles of parchment were literally underfoot anywhere she turned. The surfaces of three large trestle tables were covered in maps and fragments of diagrams and drawings. Scrubbing her hands together, she decided that she would start with the maps. Those, at least, she could organize in a meaningful way.
She found some tacks in one of the cupboards and set about arranging the maps on the far wall of the long room, which was unadorned by weapons or armor. The maps that had clearly defined borders, she matched up together and pinned side-by-side. The others she clustered in ways that looked appealing. Stepping back, she surveyed the map wall and sighed to herself. It looked good, she thought, and brought a sense of order to what had been a chaotic jumble.
Next Tia set about the stacks of parchment. Many of the leaves were written in a scratching scrawl she couldn't decipher. Others she could read, but they made little sense to her. Words like flanking, thrust, and parry she had heard on the edges of the village fire when the men had talked about their conquests, but they had no real meaning for her.
She dared not try to organize the things she didn't understand, so instead she set about making neat piles of each stack laid out upon the floor, using a single trestle table to organize her work and weighing down each stack with a smooth stone she went and gathered from the garden. At first, a path emerged in the disorder, then a finely woven rug. There was a floor here, under all this clutter, she thought with no small amount of wonder. At length, the parchment beasts were tamed and put in their places and she stood surveying the room.
All that remained were the weapons and armor. There were pegs on the walls, and it was easy to see that some of the weapons should be hung. Others seemed to have no place, and Tiadaria wondered if they were objects of study or if they had been taken in conquest, the souvenirs of some hard fought battle where the old soldier had bested his foe in a trial of combat.
A long bladed dagger rested on the table in front of her and she picked it up, deciding to begin the organization with the items nearest to hand. As soon as her hand closed on the hilt, a painful shock traveled up her arm, to her shoulder, and into her spine. She cried out and dropped the dagger. It fell point down, and sliced through slipper and flesh. The pain was incredible. A thin wail of agony burst from her lips.
“Stay still.” The old soldier's voice came from the partition between the main room and the hallway. He was peering at her, but seemed unconcerned that she was bleeding, quite freely, onto the lavish carpet that covered the bare wooden floor.
Tiadaria ground her teeth against the pain but did as she was told. Tears rolled unbidden down her cheeks, but she didn't sob. She kept as calm and still as possible though the pain in her foot was immense and nauseating. Stubborn she might be, but she was still young enough to cry when hurt and frustrated.
Royce crossed the room in quick strides and knelt by her foot, still impaled by the razor sharp blade. He looked at it from first one angle, and then another, and Tia found herself wanting to scream at him to take it out and stop tormenting her. She clenched her jaw, determined not to cry out and show any sign of weakness.
“You missed all the major tendons and blood carriers, little one,” the soldier grunted, but not unkindly. “I'm sure it hurts, but if it’s treated well and kept clean, it should cause no more lasting damage than a small scar as a token of your misadventure.”
“Please, Sir,” Tia managed to gasp, the pain was becoming unbearable and she wasn't sure how much longer she could stand there with the blade sticking out of her foot like a spring bloom.
He went to the cupboard and got a clean white rag, which he tore into long strips. He knelt by her again and laid the strips on the floor between his knees. He looked up at her once more.
“Brace yourself.”
The pain of the dagger thrust into her foot was nothing compared to what washed over her as he withdrew the dagger. She clamped her hand over her mouth, willing herself not to throw up. Fresh blood welled about the wound as he pulled the steel from her savaged flesh and soaked quickly through the thin slipper. He removed that, and taking one of the strips of rag, made a small pad which he held firmly over the wound. The other strips he used to hold the pad in place and bound them tightly to her foot and ankle, providing the pressure that his hand had offered moments before.
Tiadaria swooned and the old soldier caught her under the arms with a speed that surprised her. She barely felt the shock that went from her armpits to her spine, as the throbbing in her foot seemed to drown out any other sensation. The old soldier, however, looked distressed, and gritted his teeth in a feral grin as he lowered her into a chair near the dimly glowing hearth. A moment or two in the chair and Tia felt much less gray.
Royce tossed a log into the hearth, prodding the fire back to life with a long iron poker. He disappeared for a moment and returned with a thick, heavy fur that he threw over her shoulders, tucking the ends under her arms. He slumped in the chair opposite her. He looked very tired, Tia thought. Far more tired than a simple afternoon at home should have made him.
He turned to look at the far wall, newly festooned with the maps that she had tacked there. He looked back at her.
“You can read?” he asked, not bothering to hide the surprise in his tone.
“A little,” Tia answered, her cheeks going red with embarrassment. “The women in the north are responsible for keeping the records. Writing about doing things isn't an honorable use of time for a man. He should spend his time doing the things that are written about.”
“A man would do well to study the written records of those before him,” the old soldier remarked, studying her carefully. “How's the foot?”
“It hurts.”
“Aye and it will,” he nodded. “More tomorrow than right now, I assure you. Every step you take will remind you that you best keep a strong grip on any blade in your hand.”
“It hurt me, Sir. I was surprised.”
“Yes, that blade is plenty sharp.”
“No, Sir,” she said, and stammered when she saw his startled glance. “Begging your pardon, Sir. It hurt me before. That's why I dropped it.”
“Hurt you how?”
“Like a burning, Sir. When I picked up the blade, it felt as if my arm had caught fire, all the way up to my shoulder. That's why I dropped it. The long blade...the one from...earlier. It hurt too, but it wasn’t as bad.”
“The halberd has a wooden shaft. The dagger did not. It was your proximity to the metal that made the dagger worse.” His gnarled fingers tugged at his lower lip as he stared at her. “Didn’t you ever notice how your body reacts to steel?”
“Clan women aren’t permitted steel weapons or tools,” Tiadaria replied, her voice dripping with contempt. “Steel is too v
aluable for a woman’s hand.”
Royce snorted, but maintained his cool regard. They sat that way long enough for Tiadaria to find herself unsettled by the intensity of his gaze. She felt as if she was being judged on more than just her clumsiness.
“What’s your name, little one?”
“Tiadaria,” she replied with haughty pride. “And I'm not a little girl, Sir. I'll pass my seventeenth name-day three months hence.”
“Then you're a little one compared to me, aren't you?”
“I suppose, Sir.”
“My name is Royce. I had another name at some point. A family name, an honorable name. It’s been gone from me for many years. Now I'm simply known as Royce. Not that you'll ever call me anything other than Captain, or Sir...but you had the right to know who owns you now.”
“A name doesn't tell me who you are, Sir.”
“Fair enough,” he said, pausing to tug again at his lower lip. Then he smiled, the first full-smile she had seen from him, revealing perfect teeth that seemed out-of-place for such a rugged man. “I am Royce, former Knight of the Flame, and Sergeant-at-Arms to the One True King. I lead the Grand Army of the Human Imperium for nearly thirty years.”
“Which means, Sir?”
“Which means that I’ve forgotten more about how to wield the blade you dropped on your foot then you will ever know? Watch your tongue, little one. You enjoy a certain amount of freedom here, but if you think I won't beat you for insolence, you're mistaken.”
“Yes Sir,” Tiadaria replied sullenly. Wrapped in a warm fur by the fire, it was easy to imagine she was back at camp, listening to yarns spun by the old men. A place where she wasn't an equal, but neither was she a slave. Tiadaria and the old soldier watched the fire burn, its shifting weight sending sparks dancing up the chimney.
Chapter 5 - Looking Ahead
They spent many an evening that way. During the day, he would require her to attend things around the cottage while he went about his duties as Constable. She was expected to cook and clean and see to the domestic chores. In return, they would share the evenings and he would teach her about battles fought long ago. He helped her learn how to read with more proficiency than she had arrived with. He instructed her in the basics of strategy and tactics.
The Swordmage Trilogy: Volume 01 - The Last Swordmage Page 4
