“Hyah!” I swung my fists at him as he recoiled and then ducked as he flicked his blade over the space where my head had been. My anger fed me; it nourished me as I bounced back up to smack him solidly on the other side of his sand-dusted face.
It was a good punch, a solid hit that made my knuckles hurt.
But Captain Nol Baggar had been hit in the face many times before, I realized as his head merely bounced backwards and he stepped forward automatically. He didn’t even use his sword as he smacked me hard in the chest, sending me staggering backwards with a blow that felt like he had crushed my ribcage—
And then, pain exploded across the back of my head as I must have hit one of the Earth Crystals. I saw stars and my vision blurred to black for a moment, before I was rolling over, coughing and gasping on the floor of the cavern. My ribcage wasn’t crushed, of course—but my head felt like it was.
“NARI!” Ymmen was roaring somewhere, but it was hard to collect my thoughts.
“Now that is how to punch, girly,” I heard the captain of the Red Hounds saying with apparent pride as he stepped in front of the light of the nearest Earth Crystal and stood over me.
“The problem with people like you…” Nol Baggar said as I glared up at the man taking his time trying to kill me.
“Daza, you mean?” I spat up at him. Always the same, I thought. If it wasn’t for the pounding, throbbing headache behind my eyes I think I would have killed him just by looking at him.
“No. Heroes,” the man said with obvious disdain. “Or would-be heroes. I’ve known a hundred people like you. Soldiers who think it’s their job to turn the tide of battle, villagers who think getting themselves killed is a good idea… You’re all the same. All heroes are idiots.” He was philosophizing, and I could tell that this was a subject that he had taken a considerable amount of time to think about.
“You all believe you’re going to be the one. That you’re special. But you’re not. You’re just a fool with an idea…”
“Maybe we need some more ideas,” I gasped, attempting to crawl away from him in my pain. The captain let me go, keeping pace with me easily. “Just look at the world. Look at how terrible it is. Inyene getting away with anything she wants. Torvald not doing a thing… People like you causing mayhem across the world…” I hissed.
“Pfagh!” Baggar laughed. “You see? You think you’ve got the answers. You’re too stupid to realize when you’re beaten.”
“You’re never beaten until you’re dead.” Ymmen growled his own dragon philosophy through my mind. I knew which one I preferred. But the mercenary kept coming for me as I crawled. I scrabbled a little faster, past the next crown of Earth Lights to see something up ahead, partially hidden by the crystals and the boulders.
It looked like…a sword hilt. There, at the back of the cavern, with tumbled boulders around it and the giant sand dune on the far side looked to be a trove of some kind. There was a metal pommel, shaped into a pointed beak, or snout. I could see the brown leather cord of its grip, gleaming as fresh as the day that it must have been discarded here.
A weapon. There was my chance.
I crawled faster, my head still pounding as I pushed up on shaking legs—
“Ugh!” to suddenly feel a jab of pain as the mercenary kicked me, hard, in the back of a knee to send me sprawling to the floor again. This time, Baggar kneeled into a crouch, closer to me, and his words came back low and promising:
“You’ve lost. You can’t stop Inyene—I don’t think anyone can, now. She’ll get her throne and her crown and probably half a hundred villages are all gonna burn.” The mercenary shrugged. He didn’t seem particularly upset at that prospect.
“People like me and my Red Hounds? We’re going to do just fine. A warlord always needs soldiers. And even if we can’t trust Inyene to pay her dues—there’ll be others, the Princes of the Southern Kingdom perhaps, or the Chiefs of the Northern Kingdom. Maybe I’ll even head out to the Western Archipelago and get fat and rich on all those merchant boats!” He chuckled, before his tone suddenly went deadly serious again.
“But people like you are only gonna get crushed under Inyene. It’s the way of the world, sister. It’s a mighty shame, because someone with your attitude would have made a great mercenary—” He was musing, and I knew that he was just trying to rile me. He had no intention of convincing me to give up or letting me go or hiring me. He was like a cat playing with its dinner before he killed me.
But the worst thing was that I knew that he was right. People like Nol Baggar always did okay for themselves. They were like the Plains hyenas—they just scattered when the enemy was too strong and regrouped to pick on something weaker and smaller than they were.
It was the way of the world, I thought, as strong emotions surged through me. Even more importantly, it was the way of the Plains. Predators preyed on weaker animals. That was the dance that we all played.
I felt my lips pull back in a snarl of hatred. And that is why people like me—people like the Daza—chase off hyenas whenever we see them! He was right that there would always be the cruel and the vicious out there—until someone stopped them!
I lashed out with my foot, kicking him just below the knee on his left side. The side that was wounded. With a pained grunt, the mercenary captain fell to one side and caught at one of the boulders to steady himself—
But I was already leaping into a run, scrabbling between the boulders to reach out my hand into the trove towards the sword hilt—
But, in an instant I saw that this blade was not alone—my eyes saw a metal shield next to the sword, a small wooden box, a metal axe…A crown.
The crown was of a solid gray, and one that I realized was solid rock, with a small circle of a ruddy gold holding miniature Earthlights around its rim. The solid granite, or whatever rock it was, had been carved and smoothed into a coronet of small spikes which sat around its upper edge. It looked as though it had been freshly carved just yesterday. But it wasn’t just the expensive gold circlet or the Earth Lights that made me blink in awe—it was the wave of recognition that I felt run through me, although I couldn’t understand why. I had never seen any crown before—and yet I knew, with absolute certainty, that this was the Stone Crown.
I felt a rush of something like a hot flush pour through my body, and with it the smell of soot, ash, and frankincense filled my mind. But it wasn’t coming from Ymmen, was it? It was coming from the crown itself!
I forgot the blade and reached out to grab the Stone Crown with both my hands—
“Yargh!” But, suddenly rough hands had seized the back of my tunic and were yanking me backwards from the trove, skidding me painfully along the cavern floor.
“You little—” It was Nol Baggar, and he was furious. All pretense at charm had gone, replaced with a murderous glint in his eyes as he picked up the sword that he had dropped, turned back towards me—
“Leave. Her. Alone!” a stern voice shouted, and both the mercenary captain and I looked around to see that we weren’t the only ones on this side of the cavern. It wasn’t Naroba. I could still see her huddled form at the back…