Cohthel
I jog through the castle corridors, staying near the wall to keep sprinting knightlords from running into me while invisible. I follow them at a slower pace. By the urgency in their haste, something bad has happened.
“Get back to laundry!” a knightlord further down the corridor shouts. “Some prisoners have escaped!”
I was aware they brought in a prisoner today, the free falkon rumors naming him Ranique who was a member of the Entangling Crow mercenary band. Having been in these same dungeons myself, I never would have suspected anyone capable of escaping it. Except for me, but I had R’th to help me. Does this mercenary have a R’th?
Not my matter in the least, but I find purpose in involving myself. With Neleci announcing she’s pregnant, I need to remain occupied long enough I won’t be able to see her again before I fly out of here in search of Thaen.
I turn the corner and find a falkon trapped beneath a laundry basket, the clothes dumped in a pile nearby. I lift the basket. “What happened?”
“Mercenary escaped into the garden!” he screeches and zooms down the corridor. I don’t know a way out of the walled gardens myself, but the mercenary did escape the dungeon, after all. I open the door leading to the gardens and slink outside.
Voices murmur through the bushes. I whisper toward them to plan out my next move if I must act before the knightlords get here. I look through a bush. Someone removed the grate blocking off the culvert through the stone wall. A man, his back to me, is ramming his shoulder into the rump of a very large human who appears stuck in the culvert, water from the stream spraying out all sides with every thrust of his shoulder.
No weapon on me — not that Cinder Dream would have been any good anyway being so unreliable to kill anything — I slam the man into the ground. He proves more agile than me and wiggles out of my hasty grab, stands, and draws his sword all in the same motion, arching it toward me. The tip nicks the loose fold on the front of my shirt.
This man looks familiar but I can’t recall who, not through the thick wedge of memories the Bladehand Tower inserted through the center of my recent past. I recognized his face, and feel I’ve held conversation with him. Just can’t place where, why, or who. And for some reason the left side of his body — skin and clothes — is blue.
He doesn’t see me, and he stalls while he figures out what happened. I take advantage and wrap my arms around his neck, pulling him to the ground. He spins and drives a knee straight into my groin, and I release with a loud, “Ouch!”
He faces my voice, still confused why he can’t see me, and swings his sword again in a wide arc he gets away with because I’m still doubled over, trying not to throw up — my invisibility muting pain is likely the only reason why I don’t — and the tip of his sword cuts a deep gash across my mask. I throw myself back, scrambling on my hands and feet backward as he presses the advance, swinging his sword. He snaps a small branch off a tree he passes, swinging both branch and sword in every direction, understanding someone is attacking him even if he can’t see me.
He’s backing toward the culvert. He’ll scoot through now that the large woman freed herself from it. With no sword to parry his wild swings, I calculate his openings between swings and shoot forward to disarm him. I judged incorrectly. The edge of his blade slams into my ribcage.
The science is true: only a bladehand can successfully conquer another bladehand. This mercenary — lacking the cloak, and given too easily to wild swings without any skill — is not a bladehand. He still wins this fight because he has his sword and I don’t. I’m a master of the blade…but only if I have one.
Still.
His powerful stroke which should have cut to my lungs does nothing more than thump along my ribs as if hitting a sack of flour with a butter knife. Our mutual confusion match, looking each other in the eye even if he can’t see my expression of I have no idea…my invisibility mutes pain. I have no explanation why it prevented his sword from cutting inches deep into my body.
The mercenary hollers and drops to his chest in the stream he stands over. Someone from the other side yanks on his legs and he zips backward through the culvert on his stomach.
My groin tender, and my whacked ribs throbbing, I hiss staccato breathes as I drop to my knees in the cold stream, shiver, and slosh through. I count four humans — one the very large one, who looks like a female — running toward the stables, the mercenary hanging by his ankle in the giantess’s hand. My groin and ribs hurt too much to run. I hobble after them. They disappear inside the stable. They’re not in there long when the large stable doors burst open and the Dwarf Torc’s bullrath bellows out, all five mercenaries on its back. Screaming.
I stare, dumbfounded, as the bullrath struggles between the passengers on its back and commands shouting from the castle ramparts.
The important fact about none of this being my problem is just that: not my problem. I turn and hobble to the nearest door back into the castle with tender groin, bruised ribs, and having done nothing to make either of them worth the pain.
Back in the Grand Hall, the knightlords break their protective barrier around the kindred now wandering in a post-panic daze. Mixed racial murmurs rattle the echoing Hall into a strange resemblance of a tomb.
The Elf Torc stands arm-in-arm with her equally tall husband, their clothes matching in silk, lace, and a shimmering material outlining the edges. Her husband’s pale blond hair weaves and spins in elaborate angles and heights only a male elf could look remarkable in. Kessna, Thoraus’ wife, glows as a resplendent representation of her daughter: long black hair curled over both shoulders, blue silk nestled against a lithe body that folds and twists at all the right angles to keep the eyes busy as they traveled both up and down.
Torc Thoraus converses with several knightlords, a furious-looking Dwarf Torc at his elbow. The Dwarf Torc bristles with the typical dwarven attire they called “formal weapons” and “formal armor”, as if ready to assault the servant boy when he comes back offering punch.
I keep no qualms about eavesdropping. I sidle up behind Torc Thoraus invisible.
“…say Tataro will be fine,” Thoraus reassures the dwarf.
“I want them captured and I want them dead! How in false gold did they escape your dungeon?”
Thoraus looks about to speak, but a knightlord steps in.
“We found Garlin locked in a cell,” he says with no spark of amusement. “He tried telling us one thing and then another, but none of us believed him so he came clean and said he entered Ranique’s cell to ‘make him pay’ or some junk, and the mercenary acquired his keys. The rest speaks for itself.”
“If you already let Garlin out of that cell, you put him back. He will face trial for his gross mismanagement and I want a knightlord posted down there now!” Thoraus clenches both fists and his cheeks purple with rage.
“A knightlord is already down there. We left Garlin in the cell because we didn’t have the cell keys. He will remain there until you determine his release.”
The torc digs fingers into his curling brown-gray hair as the Knightlord walks with two others out of the Great Hall.
The panic having settled down, the orchestra further dispels the mood and resumes their music. Kindred reanimate, scuttling back to the food tables and drink.
I’m tired. It’s now the first hour of the morning. For my subterfuge with Neleci earlier, the emotional release of her painful journey in her room, my row with the mercenary in the garden, I decide a falkon can supply Neleci with the news of the escaped prisoners. I slink back to my room invisible, curiosity satiated. No one needs to know I heroically failed at stopping the escaped prisoners. Even delaying them would have been something.
“What was the alarm for?” Atalixsphere says before I’d closed to door, raising her long black neck to look at me.
“You didn’t bother to step out and see for yourself?”
“No. I didn’t care that much.” She lays her head back down on her forelegs.
I scowl at the sword on my bed, a blade capable of slicing through any other blade as if it were paper. Like I’d done to Thaen’s blade two years ago. And I left it. On my bed. I go to the mirror and witness the scratch the mask now features across the entire length of my cheek, arching over a blind eye covered beneath.
I lift my shirt to inspect the growing bruise on my ribs, bewildered why the prisoner’s sword hadn’t sliced me through to the spine. My overwhelming desire to catch the prisoner clouded my thoughts toward my survival against an armed man, and that decision punched my gut as I watched the sword arch toward me as if time had slowed, but when it struck my body, it landed more like a bludgeon than a cut, so I accused a dull edge. But I’d looked at the prisoner’s face, eyes shock-wide, as if he, too, expected more from his sword. Cutting a groove across my mask testified to a well-honed edge. I was invisible so I understood the muted pain, but I don’t understand why it appeared to have stopped the blade.
I sleep invisible because my bruising decreases in pain. I dream of catching screaming baby after screaming baby out of the same mother with no hope she will stop delivering soon, feeling, somehow, responsible for all of it: the pregnancy, the birth, the child-rearing.
I wake, and it hits me, the thing I’ve been denying ever since she told me.
Thaen will be a father.
My best friend will soon be a father.
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