by Renée Jaggér
A stout individual, most likely a man and about her height of five foot eight, was tanking his way forward, making no effort at stealth. He wore full plate armor, probably over mail, and a great helm that hid his face. Additionally, he carried a big kite shield and an arming sword with a finely-tapered point capable of piercing all but the thickest and strongest armor.
Bailey would have to be careful. There was no way her swords could cut through so much steel.
Not that I’m supposed to kill the bastard anyway. Clonking him in the head and pinning him to the ground ought to be good enough. She nodded to herself.
The helmet limited the man’s vision. The werewitch hung back, creeping around the tree as he approached so the wooden trunk remained between her and him. He gave no sign of having seen her.
Once he was two or three steps beyond her, she leaped out, arms wheeling as she swung her swords toward the back of his helmet. He started to turn around, and the blades caught him in the side of the head as his shield pushed out and threw her off-balance.
Both combatants reeled back. The armored man shook his head, the clang of steel on steel still ringing in the air. Bailey stumbled but found her feet again quickly enough. Then her foe tried to use magic.
He waved his sword and the air rippled. What should have been a half-fiery concussive burst came out as a weird snaking line of distortion. Still, it moved fast, and Bailey spun and raised her cloak to deflect it. The metal scales shone as they absorbed the brunt of the magic, and the physical impact of the projectile whipped the cloak back.
By then, Bailey was moving to avoid being struck. She jumped and kicked, her sword-arms coming down to prevent the man’s sword and shield from rising toward her, and her booted foot struck him in the chest. He let out a loud oof and crashed into the tree, then slumped to the ground.
Bailey sprang atop him and leveled the point of a blade in front of his helmet’s visor-slit. “Yield!” she snapped.
He groaned. “I yield.”
She nodded and stepped back. “Smart man. Better luck next time, I guess.” Then she moved on into the forest, seeking her next engagement.
Nine more trainees confronted her, and she overcame them all. Most of them had little if any experience at hand-to-hand combat, so they tended to panic and blunder into stupid mistakes or overexert themselves too quickly. The ones who tried to fight with magic found their spells badly weakened and hard to control. Once Bailey had to leap aside when an oak nearly fell on top of her. Someone’s plasma lance had spun off-course and destroyed the trunk of the tree behind her.
She faced people as lightly armored as herself and as heavily armored as the first man, and people wielding light weapons or huge ones, everything from daggers and hand axes to scimitars, maces, spears, and swords. Two of the combatants she defeated were women. She couldn’t say which were demigods, scions, and or other things she didn’t know about yet.
She also suspected that her swords hit harder than they should have by rights. They might carry a slight enchantment that stacked arcane mass behind their blows.
The ninth man wore partial plate over mail and leather and a sallet helm and carried a two-handed greatsword of the late-medieval variety that was over five feet long, with a complex ringed hilt and parrying hooks past the blade’s ricasso. He seemed athletic and understood the basic movements and positioning of a fight.
But he clearly had no experience using his huge weapon, and especially not in a dense forest. Confronting him, Bailey avoided being hit by the long blade by a couple hairs’ breadth, and her eyes bulged as it whizzed beside her head. She jumped aside, realizing that if the man did strike her, with all his size and weight behind such a large sword, she was done for.
He didn’t. She was able to whack him on the knee and in the armpit with a quick run-by attack, evading his slow counter. When he tried wheeling the sword around to use its momentum to strike faster, the tip glanced off a tree branch and screwed up his balance.
Bailey moved in, drove her armored knee into his codpiece, whacked him atop the helmet, and threw him face-first into a huge protruding root. He groaned in pain and dropped his sword, then slumped, unconscious.
“Good,” she breathed. She couldn’t recall how many people were participating in the melee, but having defeated nine of them, she had to be one of the frontrunners in the scoring process.
A short jog led her to sounds of combat; another pair of trainees was brawling ahead. The girl pushed through a screen of foliage and took in the scene at a glance.
It was Carl, locked in battle with someone of comparable size wearing heavy black lamellar armor and a helmet that looked vaguely Asian; she couldn’t place it otherwise. The other guy carried a two-handed pole-hammer with a relatively large head and a nasty spike atop the shaft.
The black-armored guy clashed his longer weapon against Carl’s one-handed mace, and before Carl could retaliate by grabbing the hammer with his gauntlet, the sheer force of the blow drove him to his knees. Then the guy in black kicked him from the side, bowling him over. He raised his hammer.
“Shit,” Bailey gasped. Acting on instinct, she rushed forward to rescue her new friend, her body low to the ground but her swords held high.
Her intrusion distracted the knight. He started to pull back his overhead swing, and Carl seized the opportunity to raise his mace and knock the hammer aside.
Then Bailey piled into the other man, swept her cloak in front of his face to further disorient him, then kneed, kicked, and backhanded him in the head with her buckler. Meanwhile, Carl stuck the shaft of his mace between the man’s ankles, and he toppled, cursing, to the ground.
“I yield,” he grunted.
Bailey and Carl stood up and looked at each other.
“Y’know,” the werewitch remarked, “I don’t recall old Malkeg saying there was any rule against teaming up.”
The scion grinned. “Me neither. Let’s get ‘em. You’re faster, but I’ve got the thicker armor and a beefier weapon, so we’ll say you go in first to throw them off, then I finish them.”
“Sounds like a plan.” She set off in the same direction she’d been going, and Carl followed close on her heels.
Soon they encountered one guy wearing a heavy helm but only a brigandine tunic, bracers, and shin guards. He wielded a hand-axe in his right hand and a dagger in his left. Bailey darted in to sweep the axe aside with her swords while Carl struck him in the center of the torso with his mace slightly outside the reach of the dagger, and the man fell to the ground, bruised and nauseated.
Carl accepted the fellow’s surrender, and the pair set off.
Things rapidly grew more complicated, however. Other trainees had reached the same conclusion as Bailey and Carl and began working in small groups. No more lone fighters remained. The melee had become a team sport, a miniature clan war in which clusters of two to six clashed with one another.
Being only a pair, Bailey and Carl hung back from skirmishes with the larger groups, instead leading them into battle against other factions. Often, poorly-controlled magic flew when groups ran into each other, then the two of them moved in to finish off whoever remained.
As the bodies dropped and the surrenders flowed in, it seemed a long time passed without the werewitch and the scion encountering anyone. They surmised there must only be a handful of combatants still in the match. There had to be someone, or the trainers would have ended the bout.
They burst into a clearing and met their final opponents.
There were four of them in a line, three males and one female, all middlingly armored, much like Carl. The woman held a spear, two of the men gripped hand-and-a-half swords, and the fourth man hoisted a two-handed military flail.
“Hi,” one of the swordsmen called. “Looks like we’re the last ones. Now, we believe in a fair fight, so let’s not use any magic that might—”
That instant, the woman on the left and the man on the right hurled spirals of lightning and ice, which pulsed and sta
ggered as the realm tried to suppress or skew their effects.
Carl jumped and rolled behind a tree to the right. Bailey stood her ground and swept up her cloak. The enchanted scales neutralized the ice shards and deflected a lightning bolt back at the woman with the spear, striking her in the breastplate. She screamed as her muscles seized up; the charge wasn’t strong enough to be fatal, but she was incapacitated for the moment. Bailey charged her and the swordsman who’d lied to them as Carl lunged toward the other two.
The werewitch attacked the man with the longsword first since the spearwoman was still recovering. He swept his blade toward her face, and she had to tilt her head back to avoid it. In the same motion, she threw her left-hand sword at him, and it crashed into the faceplate of his helmet.
Then the girl was on him, hooking her elbow around his sword-arm and sticking her foot between his legs to unbalance him. He smashed into the spearwoman as she tried to join the fight. Bailey bashed them both in the heads with her shield, and they went down like dropped sacks of potatoes.
Carl had shoved the other swordsman aside while he dealt with the guy wielding the flail. The latter swung the pole of his weapon at an angle so the spiked head on its short chain would bypass Carl’s mace and strike him in the head.
The scion anticipated that. He blocked the pole with his own weapon, then punched the flail’s head with his gauntlet. Steel crunched and Bailey heard Carl gasp in pain, but he yanked the flail out of the man’s hands and buffeted him with mace blows.
Bailey retrieved her other sword and pounced on the remaining swordsman, keeping at a distance where she could batter his blade with her shorter weapons. He’d have to make a committed lunge to hit her. Then Carl, having subdued the flail-wielder, flanked the man, and the pair overwhelmed him with a flurry of strikes.
When the last man hit the ground, the horn they’d heard at the beginning of the melee blew again, and the projected image of Malkeg appeared in the center of the clearing.
“Done!” he shouted. “Marvelous job. No one was seriously hurt—well, nothing beyond what a little magic and bed rest can cure—and you used both strategy and tactics. There might be hope for you maggots yet. I only saw a handful of you relying too much on magic. Return to base.”
The holograph vanished and a portal opened in its place. Bailey and Carl helped the four they’d beaten to their feet, and all six stepped through, assuming other portals had been conjured for the people elsewhere in the forest.
Carl told the guy with the sword who’d addressed them, “That was a dirty trick, saying you wanted us not to use magic right as your guys attacked with spells.”
The other man shrugged. “You heard Malkeg. No rules except what leads to winning. Too bad we didn’t win.”
“Yeah, too bad,” Bailey agreed.
Carl let out a long breath. He was near the end of the table in the same place where he’d sat down next to Bailey during brunch. “Feels good to get out of that stuffy armor. It was chafing my armpit.”
Bailey, seated next to him, snorted laughter. “Seconded, and I took the most comfortable option available. I don’t want to think about what the guys in full plate went through.”
She picked up one of the fluffy bread rolls from her tray and dipped it into the thick chicken soup the mess hall had served for dinner. Their beverage was a crisp and sweet cider again.
The werewitch and the scion spent a few minutes tearing into their food, relishing the boost in energy and feeling of satiation it gave them after their exertions during the mass skirmish. Once they’d eaten two-thirds or so of the meal, they started talking again.
“So,” Bailey began, “was that your first time doing that shit? The free-for-all battle in the woods. I get the impression you’ve been here longer than I have.”
Carl guzzled half a cup of cider. “Yes, actually. I’ve been here for what feels like a week, maybe? It’s hard to judge time in the Other.”
Bailey nodded. She had noticed the same phenomenon during her previous lengthy sessions of training and combat in the arcane realm.
“But,” the scion went on, “this was my first plunge into that particular activity. I think they do it about once a week.”
“Gotcha,” said the werewitch. “Today’s my first full day being here, so it seems like they sure don’t waste time. Makes me wonder what the hell else they have in store for us.” She mopped up the soup residue in her bowl with what was left of her roll.
Carl’s eyes went distant. “There are a wide variety of training methods. That’s not in dispute. Expect the unexpected.”
Before Bailey could respond, someone came up and stood over them. They both looked up.
Their visitor was a young man even taller and more muscular than Carl, with pale skin, shoulder-length platinum-blond hair, and a broad clean-shaven jaw. He wore a red sleeveless vest and brown trousers.
“Greetings,” he opened as he sat down across from the pair. “I am Ragnar the Red-Handed. I’ve seen the two of you around but have not yet had the chance to speak to you. We’ve all been busy.”
Bailey chuckled. “Ain’t that the truth?” She and Carl introduced themselves, and they all shook hands.
Ragnar stuffed a roll in his mouth, chewed, and then remarked, “I suppose you’re wondering who I am, aside from my name. I’m a Norse warrior, and it seems I have some godly blood, so the powers that be saw fit to persuade me to come here for training. Likely your own stories are much the same.”
Carl leaned back on the bench. “More or less, yes.” He and the werewitch gave the capsule versions of their backgrounds.
Bailey asked, “How much godly blood do you have, Ragnar? Are you an outright demigod, or is it more like you’re one-sixteenth divine or whatnot?”
Shrugging his heavy shoulders, Ragnar muttered something that started out inaudible and rose to, “I’m not quite sure and it matters not, so there’s no point in pressing me on the subject. I have enough divine blood for this place’s purposes.”
“Fair enough,” the werewitch conceded.
Ragnar waved a massive hand. “Anyhow, I saw the results of today’s battle royale. I’ve been here for longer than I can remember, long enough that I recall the first one they ever had. They no longer consider it necessary for me to participate in all of them, so they denied me entrance into today’s event, but word always spreads when there’s a battle composed mostly of new arrivals. People keep an eye on the winners, so I say, well done, the two of you. Beautiful work.”
The werewitch and the scion laughed and accepted the Norseman’s congratulations, and in the free time allowed to them, they spoke to him about his own life and career. It was obvious to Bailey that he did not come from the modern world. She wondered if after his training was complete, he’d be inserted back into the Viking Age.
Contemplating this further confused her about how time worked in the Other and also made her curious that he knew English, whereas several other trainees had spoken in foreign languages.
“...and so, having vanquished the last of the frost giants on Eysturoy, we returned to Streymoy—that is the most important of the Faroes, you see—and commenced a bout of feasting and drinking that apparently lasted four days. I say apparently because someone else had to fill in the details for me later. It was such a good feast that I don’t remember most of it.”
He roared with laughter at his own joke, and his good-natured enthusiasm was so infectious that Bailey and Carl couldn’t help laughing, too.
“Ragnar,” Bailey stated, “you’ve had an interesting career, that’s for damn sure.”
Carl had to agree. “And a longer career than ours, though we’ve both been around the block a few times, so to speak.”
In the short period they’d been speaking to the Norseman, he’d regaled them with tales of hunting monsters and wild beasts, fighting battles and duels, drinking, partying, and rubbing elbows with the gods. He’d seen more violence than Bailey and Carl combined, yet it didn’t seem to ha
ve affected his jolly demeanor. The culture he came from was...different.
The trainers had no more activities scheduled for them that day. Bailey, Carl, and Ragnar spent some time mingling with other acolytes, drinking a mead-like beverage that got them effectively drunk, talking, joking, and bullshitting. They met a handful of people who seemed worth further interaction, and a couple who seemed like insufferable boors.
The three of them stuck together the whole evening.
Bailey finally retired to her quarters, where Fenris was resting and meditating before the fire, and slipped into bed. An important thought went through her mind:
At least I’ve made a pair of friends. That definitely helps.
Chapter Five
Since Roland had spent the night in Portland and it had only been a ninety-minute drive to the northwest of town, he agreed to meet Dante in Leverich Park in Vancouver, Washington, to spare him the final twenty minutes of obnoxious urban driving. Besides, they’d be rambling all over town soon anyway.
“Well,” Roland greeted the other wizard as they approached each other across the vibrant emerald grass of the park, “you’re looking...about the same, but nothing wrong with that. How goes it?”
Dante snorted and ran the fingers of his right hand through his long blond forelock. “Thanks, I guess. I’m fine. Charlene and I are more or less together now, so that’s good. Things in Seattle have been peaceful. It’s been a while since I’ve been to Portland, so this ought to be interesting.”
Roland nodded. “Congratulations to the two of you. I thought I saw you guys exchanging an awful lot of ‘meaningful glances’ before you rambled back to the Puget Sound, so I’m not shocked. Bailey and I are well. We’ve gotten to spend time together recently. Not as much as I’d like, but enough.”
“Good,” Dante acceded. “I think we all deserved a break after...you know, that stuff.”
