“I never”

Clang.

“counted,”

Clang.

“not even among my”

Clang. Pant.

“remotest hopes,”

Clang. clangclang.

“that I would die”

Pant. Shuffle back. Guard up.

“by the sword of a foe”

Lunge. Clang. Parry. Back.

“as illustrious as”

Clang.

“the bastard boy duke,” said the man who would, within the hour, kill Eathel. At least so saith Serixiphina, the woman who lived in his head.

Despite his short life, Eathel had been in many battles. Sera had been with him for all of them. This was only the second time she’d sounded genuinely worried.

Eathel was indeed a bastard, but the ‘duke’ part of the insult was his father, the Duke of Tera; it would never be Eathel; especially now that his father’s second wife had just a few years past given birth to a son, the real son, the heir apparent to the mightiest region in this corner of the known world.

Men tacked on ‘duke’ precisely to ridicule him for the title he might have had, the vast Duchy he might have led, but never would. He was no real son, nor would he ever be.

The slight stung all the more because it was a title the whole of the Teran people had, not so long ago, expected would likely pass to Eathel himself.

Despite having been born of sin and moral lapse, of a common woman, no less, he was the eldest male child of the Duke by blood. Until his younger half-brother was born.

Early in life his father had Eathel sworn in as the sole heir to the Duchy of Tera, provided there were no legitimate children in the future. All the vassals had knelt before him, child though he was, and swore to be Eathel’s man for life. For a while, they acted as if they meant it. That was, at least until his father remarried. Which no one had expected his ornery father to do.

Clang. Swing. Dodge. Clang back. Both shuffle away.

There, in a little holy clearing, deep in the woods, Eathel and his foe circled one another, en guard. The swords that had been making the racketous grima were held up before them, so close their ends occasionally touched in a few nervous taps.

“My god. You look so much like your father,” said the man.

So this attacking stranger not only recognized him, Eathel realized, but apparently knew his father’s appearance well enough to see the strong resemblance between the powerful Duke of Tera and his off-born boy that everyone invariably remarked on.

A rapid clanging of sword on sword. The woods about them muffled the sharp report of whooshing, swinging metal, instantly arrested to an abrupt stop by an equally deadly swing of a countering scythe, to a sound like the breaths the two men panted out.

Sword fighting was the noise of sharp screams on metal or whispers from the singing swings of the blade—nothing in between.

They had enough space to be loud here, encircled as they were with the rune-carved rocks of the old sacred site.

“I am glad I will be killed by someone of consequence,” said the leering man.

“You are so certain of defeat,” said Eathel. “I have not beaten you yet.”

Their blades clanged again, binding for a moment as both men panted in brief respite.

“Oh, but you will,” said Eathel’s foil.

The man feinted a lunge. Eathel rattled off his opponent’s sword. The man shuffled back into a resting guard, his sword up and at attention in front of him.

“I have heard tales of your exploits abroad,” Eathel’s opposite said.

Clang. Shuffle. Clang.

“And of your facility,” he continued

Clang. Tapping, testing Eathel’s left again.

“With the blade,” said the man, lunging, but overreaching, stumbling a bit.

Eathel parried, though, it was really more of a tap on the blade and a dodge out of the way of the man’s stumble.

Let him talk, said Serixiphina. You’re on an investigation; this is your chief lead. He clearly wants to talk.

He nodded at her, though Sera had no face or head to nod at. There was nothing really at all to see to her, save, may be a wisp of shadow at broad daylight and the slim white, glowing sliver of a mouth, where a woman’s mouth would be if a real one stood by him. And these were faint even to Eathel; no one else had ever seemed to notice her phantom grin.

The man shook his head. “where I am from, our god is angry. It is a warrior god. When its acolytes displease it, it makes war on them.”

Quitting while he was ahead in the area of wit, Eathel asked his opponent, “And where is this place?”

“A place where we take seriously our god’s calls for violence,” said the man. They were still shuffling in little steps around the same, roving invisible point at their center. They slowly moved closer until their blades were in danger of tapping.

“I’ve been to a place like that,” said Eathel. “Though I found, before long, that the calls we heard for violence came not from any god, but from”

The man lunged to Eathel’s left in a waist-high sweep; Eathel parried a bit too fancily, holding his sword a bit too far up his shoulders.

“I sincerely doubt you have ever been where I am from,” said the man, spitting after his failed sally.

“Who are you? Where are you from?” asked Eathel. “Why did you do what you did?”

“I can’t answer three questions at once. But what,” said the man; while he spoke, his eyes flicked to take in the terrain. Eathel took this opportunity to dive in with a lunge calculated to catch him by surprise. The man was a bit rattled in his response, but he recovered and, on instinct, batted away Eathel’s thrusting stab with surprising strength given the angle of the man’s sword. His attacker’s hands fought a bit separate from him; Eathel quickly got the feeling this experienced soldier he faced had the memories of innumerable battles engrained in its sinew.

Such was the fighter’s composure that he finished the sentence after the few panting pauses he needed to address Eathel’s foray. “is it exactly I did?” asked the man.

“Ravaged an innocent people. Murdered children. Burned their houses and their food,” said Eathel.

“Oh yes, there’s that,” said the man. He lunged then, instantly forward. Eathel parried. “If my god judges their deaths in accord with divine law, my god will grant me serenity and thrill in endless cycle, forever and always, well past the end of time.”

“But if your religion’s followers are anything like you, divining divine law in every case of violence, your god sounds interminably battling paperwork instead.”

Blades tapped. Both shuffled; neither made any move of consequence.

“Is that perhaps not why your god never becomes personally involved in earthly strife?” asked Eathel.

The man laughed. “What a fight that would be, for our god is strong,” he said. “But it does not itself strap on its war regalia”

A smooth, elegant, deadly move and the man was suddenly on Eathel’s outside right with his attacker’s sword somehow transposed to the man’s outside hand. If Eathel hadn’t been looking for the move and ready for it, the man would have had nothing in his path to Eathel’s armpit and up.

But instead, Eathel swung back and out to the right, staying aside the man’s thrust. His sword was too long to get a good thrust of his own into the man, but he could punch the crossbar of his sword into the man’s face. This, Eathel did, with the degree of strength and ferocity he only ever seemed to be able to harness when he was about to die.

The blow landed with a thick, wet slap right where Eathel wanted it to. Right in his attacker’s cheekbone.

Eathel felt elation and power. His hate, borne of fear, for this man flash froze into a cool and insidious hate for this man, this one borne of anger. Kill him? How dare he try to take his life from him?

The main hefted his sword and charged—lunged, rather—at Eathel, who parried well enough that, combined with the disorganized fury of the man’s attack, saw them punching at one another in close proximity; there was no metal sounding off the trees. Just desperate grunts and heaving groans.

Then the attacker slammed his forehead into Eathel’s nose with a soft crunch and a lightning bolt of pain that was all there was in the world for a moment. Blood in his eyes. His face was a mask of pain. Eathel spat blood and spit on the man and tore him to the ground.

They went down in an embrace, tumbling down the side of a ridge that lay outside of the sacred site. They rolled over one another.

The back of Eathel’s the neck slammed into a tree trunk. He went dizzy for a moment.

The man's leg slammed into a rock. There was a snap, maybe of the leg, maybe of a branch.

They tumbled all akimbo in one another and thudded hard into a little gulley at the base of the hill.

Shaking his pounding head, his heartbeat drumming at a dangerous pace, Eathel saw they were twisted among each other in a mess of roots from a giant tree.

The man had a bone breaking through the pale skin of his calf, but had already started shuffling his body, moving toward something, squirming his body against Eathel’s.

The dagger Sera had reminded him to bring was half sticking out of its sheath on Eathel’s belt and the man pulled it out and stabbed Eathel in the leg.

The dagger was stuck in his leg—in his thigh, a deep cut. They tossed on the ground some more until Eathel grabbed the knife out of the side of his leg and stabbed it desperately in the man's neck and the left side of the man’s neck opened into an obscene little waterfall of blood.

Just before he sawed his way through the man’s vocal cords, the dying man was able to sputter out, “see? I am vanquished. I said be,” Glug. “fore. You would,” cough, “kill,” cough, “me.”

Eathel stopped to hear if he would say more, but the dead man had lost the ability to speak.

Eathel caught his breath, staggering; he inhaled deeply and put his fingers to his mouth and tried to whistle. Instead, he spat some blood and coughed. He now felt some deep aches in his stomach. After a few tries, he finally was able to whistle loudly enough that the high, shrill sound cut out through the air and bounced off the mountains of the little valley. He hoped Echobella could hear it.

Blood was freely flowing from his leg.

Eathel rolled the man over and looked more closely at him. He had on a thick jacket, but it had an inner lining that was soft and thin enough to make a passable bandage.

While he shredded out strips of cloth, he looked the man over. He found nothing that gave him any idea who the men were. The man was a average size, didn't look like he was from any place in particular.

As he cut the jacket around his upper arm, Eathel did see a tattoo on his shoulder, but on the side facing forward, so it was only visible head on. Where some legions in the levies put their marks. And indeed there was the number eight where the number of the battalion would go.

But the insignia was a splotchy kind of ‘v’ shape. It did not so much look like symbol or depiction of an animal or weapon or tree or something, which these types of things usually were; rather, it looked more a mistake by them who tapped in the ink.

Was it a country?

That doesn’t look like anyone’s lands I know of, said Sera.

Me neither, said he.

After he had cut the front of the man’s coat to tattered pieces, his leg was going numb and the bleeding seemed squelched. The bandage-tourniquet he’d ended up making appeared to be working. He took a few breaths and looked longingly up the hill he’d just tumbled down. He desperately wanted to go back up for the man’s sword in its sheath, but he couldn’t chance the time and effort looking for it. There was his wound and the task ahead of him. Still, what a shame to leave behind so valuable an instrument.

He could probably get his mail though.

He tried standing and fell when he put weight on the injured leg and felt a profound shout of pain. He lay on the ground, wincing, blinking out a few threads of tears as the pain throbbed back and forth like the clapper, back and forth, striking hard the bell’s waist. After a few moments of receding pain, he crawled over to rest against a tree. Letting out a few groans of pain.

Let’s see if that sobbing makes it into the ballad, said Sera.

What happened to being worried about me? he asked.

You were right. I was overreacting, she said.

I can’t believe it.

I can overreact. I rarely do. But it’s possible.

No, I meant how I’m ‘right.’

What?

You said ‘you were right.’

Oh, she said, rolling her eyes. I didn’t even notice I was saying it because acknowledging your rectitude is no great labor for me; I seldom do it because it seldom turns out to be the case.

You have no problem saying ‘I’m right’?

Not at all, dear heart, she said.

No, I mean that I, Eathel, vis-a-vis myself, am right. Not that you have any reservations claiming yourself correct.

Is this really what you want to be talking about right now? Do you not need to be getting out of here?

It’s in Bella’s hands now, or her hooves, as it were. I’m not going to try to stand any more on this leg if I can help it. Bella will be an hour or two away in negotiating a way down that ravine. What the hell else are we supposed to do?

Talk about what happened, said Sera.

What happened, he said, flatly.

He was in a strange mood, somehow less inclined to a strategic exercise in thinking.

Perhaps it was his having just before slammed a ceremonial knife into a stranger’s neck and watched the man die, moaning on top of him, an inch from his face, in the climax to an intimate, ghastly tantrum of violence during which he’d nearly died himself.

Or, on the other hand, it might very well be that it was the hour following all that he had spent cutting bandages off of his assailant’s dead body.

Yes. What we know. What we think. We have not yet made an inventory of what transpired these three days past.

Very well. Proceed, he said.

Yes, thank you, she said icily. So, when that herald arrived

Proceed, he said and paused. Knowing I’m right.

I can’t believe you. We were not even talking about anything. I was talking about you crying like a baby. But yes. So right.

Excellent. Now, proceed, he said.

She started again, daring him to start anew a-japing among them. Valuing his sanity, he demurred.

Four days previously, they had been inspecting the works at the south-central garrison. What happened started there three days ago. At first it was nothing but murmurs around the fort.