Empire of Ashes

Chapter LXXXV - Warmer

It was his turn to attack. He was fast enough to rain blows upon me, but he kept them careful and measured. He was not trying to overwhelm me with sheer force — no, he watched for the places I was not so good at defending, and he made every single swing count. I managed to turn one of them, and that was only because he wanted me to lower my blade.

Soon enough, my sword was on the ground again, and I could feel a dozen places stinging where he had struck me with the flat of his blade. More than half would have been fatal. Breathing hard now, I picked up my sword for the second time.

It only took a few more engagements for me to realise that he was better than Tem. He was better than Tem had ever been. It was no wonder that he was so confident and no wonder that he had risked issuing the challenge. He fought like a god.

By the time Herox called a halt, ten minutes later, and I was sticky with sweat and my chest was heaving. Saqui blinked at me once, slowly, his head moving from side to side, and I knew he hadn't managed it. Something must have gone wrong.

Gods above. We didn't have time for this.

"Your turn," Herox told the assassins, and they came down from the walkway dutifully. I was on my way to swap places with them when I noticed a group of royal guard laughing themselves breathless. They were supposed to be guarding the trellis, but one of them was putting on a performance — hacking and slashing with an imaginary sword.

"It were an archer," he said once he was done. "One of the buggers with the longbows. He wasn't so brave when I got close, I'll tell you."

I might have been able to walk past, might have been able to ignore him, had Cambria not been the only country in Aenmia that used longbows and had Eirac not been rotting in Canton. I stopped in my tracks, my hand tightening around the sword hilt.

A member of the audience asked a question I didn't catch, and the performer waved a hand dismissively. "Poor buggers, all of them. And they were revolting in more ways than one, if you know what I mean... Honestly, you should have seen some of the hovels. More suited for the Age of Iron than the present day. No sewage, no chimneys, nothing."

"And on the battlefield?" another guard asked.

"Cambrians aren't as stupid as the Pikish and the Galuics, I'll give them that. But they die easy and they run easy," he laughed. "We routed some just by pointing our spears in their general direction. It was hard to tell the soldiers from the women and children in that regard."

I could hear the blood roaring in my ears. I looked down at the sword in my hand and then back to the laughing soldiers, and then I started walking. It wasn't a conscious decision. It just happened. I will admit that I did not try very hard to stop it.

I shouldered my way into the group and stopped facing the performer. His laughter faltered and died, a bewildered frown replacing the smile. I rested the tip of my sword on his collarbone, and I flicked it once to draw out a line of red. The man flinched.

"What did you say?" I asked softly.

He gaped at me. He tried to take a step backwards, but there was a wall in the way. His friends were frozen with the shock of it, which was lucky, because I was very outnumbered.

"Who are you?" he demanded. "What are you—"

I pressed the blade a little deeper, letting it find bone. "You couldn't tell who was a soldier and who was a child? Is that why you slaughtered infants in their cribs and rode down little children as they ran?"

Two of his friends came to their senses and drew their swords. They probably would have run me through there and then had someone not grabbed me from behind. One arm around my waist, the other crushing my shoulder to keep the sword still. It was the king, of course.