“I'm sorry, Daish,” said Kiel, turning and drawing his blade. “I do regret this. But it is trust that the serrinim cannot afford to place upon a human right now. When even some of our own number are wavering in their resolve…“and he glanced at Rhillian,”…then how can we trust one of you?”
Daish stared at him, dumbfounded. A blade came out in reply. Aisha's.
“No,” she said, her cheeks tear-streaked, staring at Kiel past the edge of her blade. “No, you will not.”
“Aisha,” Kiel said sternly, his grey eyes narrowed. “You forget yourself. You are one of us, Aisha. Are you not?”
Aisha blinked. Her blade wavered. She struggled to hold her ground, as though the valley itself were shifting under her.
“Aisha,” came a new voice, and now Arendelle was emerging from the surrounding serrin, green-vested and helmed like the other men. He approached her slowly. “Aisha, you must listen. Can you not feel it? Can you not feel the pull?”
Aisha struggled for breath. Her arms trembled. She tried not to look at Arendelle as the tall man approached.
“Aisha, his knowledge risks our plan. We cannot trust one outside the vel'ennar, Aisha, he is not bound to us as you are. You know this. You know that the survival of our people comes first.”
Arendelle's hand closed on Aisha's wrist. Aisha was crying. She could not look at Daish. She could not move her blade. She knew how this would end, and now the horror of her own helplessness was reducing her to tears.
“You cannot use that blade against us, Aisha,” Arendelle murmured in her ear, leading her slowly aside. “No serrin ever has, not in two thousand years. You have human blood in your veins, yet you are one of us. Come and join us, Aisha. Do not look back.”
Behind her, the talmaad kicked the back of Daish's knees and made him kneel. Daish struggled, but he was too weak still from his injuries to do anything against his strong guards. Kiel approached, blade drawn, and stood to one side. When Daish's head was down in the correct position, Kiel's blade raised high in the moonlight.
A blade whistled. Kiel's sword did not. He dropped it midstroke and clutched at his throat. There his hands closed on the hilt of a knife. Blood flowed thick and fast. His grey eyes looked up, with blank astonishment. Rhillian stood not ten paces away, hand extended in the expert release of a marksman. Kiel saw, and did not comprehend, for what he saw was impossible. He fell with a puzzled look, and sprawled on the grass.
Arendelle charged, blade whipping clear. Perhaps he hesitated, as the fractured vel'ennar reasserted itself in one final gasp, and reminded him that it was a serrin at whom he swung. Or perhaps it made no difference now. Steel clashed on steel, once fast, then again with a slide of counterstrike footing, then a final ripping cut. Arendelle hit limply and slid downslope, blood staining the grass a moonlit, silvery red.
Rhillian held that final killing pose, low on one knee, bloodied blade extended. The serrin holding Daish backed away, eyes wide with horror. A hundred serrin faces stared at her, with all the disbelief and shock of a people who had just seen their worst collective nightmare come to life before their eyes. A hundred pairs of hands itched to reach for blades, and fight back against the one who had killed two of their very own. And yet the one who had killed them, impossibly, unbelievably, was also of the serrinim.
Rhillian stood slowly, and cricked her neck. Her sword arm circled, then came about to find a comfortable ready stance. Her emerald eyes blazed at them all, bright like the moon and cold as death.
“So,” she said to her people. “Who is next?”
Sasha and Yasmyn faced off beside a stream in a grove of trees. In each of their hands was a long stick, scavenged from the surrounding woods. Sasha never sparred with real blades. She trained as she fought, and the way she fought, people died.
Bergen watched nearby, and waited for Arken's men to arrive. Daish had remained in Father Belgride's temple, not in physical shape to attempt climbing a mountain. Sasha did not have much faith that that would stop him trying to find Aisha, however.
Yasmyn had talent, and applied herself with an intensity like the burning sun. Sasha kept it simple, and built on Yasmyn's knowledge of knife fighting, which gave her a foundation in stance, footwork, and simple combinations. Two-handed svaalverd, however, was rather more complex, and deadly. Yasmyn kept walking into combinations that Sasha could finish in her sleep, simply not seeing what lay beyond her immediate stroke. Talent meant nothing without experience, and if she encountered a half-decent swordsman in an even fight, svaalverd or not, Yasmyn was finished.
“Shields,” Sasha said then, and presented her left forearm as though wearing a shield, holding her stick right-handed. “Horrible things. Most guardsmen in Ilduur, defending a fixed position, will use them.”
“Useful things,” Bergen countered, leaning against a tree with eyes on the road past the shore of Lake Andal. “I can crush your head with a shield strike alone.”
“Horrible things because,” Sasha continued, “if you let them, they can be intimidating. They interrupt natural swordwork, they can confuse fundamentals, take space from you. You treat them with contempt because that's how you beat them-with aggression. Once you start retreating, you've already conceded.”
She showed Yasmyn how shields limited a fighter to a one-sided reach from the one shoulder, and how his opposite side became a refuge where a two-handed fighter could stand in range, but where the shieldsman could not reach.
“You have to be close,” she told Yasmyn, demonstrating. “He'll try to crowd you with his shield, to take away your space, so that's not easy. But if you're close enough, and he swings, you step…”
“Underneath and to the side,” said Yasmyn, seeing immediately. Now behind Sasha's shoulder, and with a clear strike to Sasha's exposed side.
“Exactly. The sword arm is the weak side, like the underside of a porcupine. Shieldsmen like to defend with the shield, they lose the art of defending with the blade, and since they can only really attack with the forehand across their body, that rotation takes their shield out of play, and if they miss, they're dead. Also, I don't care if he's as big as your brother Markan, a one-handed grip can never defend as strongly as a two-hander because the wrist folds like this, you see? A two-handed grip creates a cross brace, like a good builder making a cross brace for a temple roof. That's another reason shieldsmen can't defend with a blade against a two-hander.”
Yasmyn's eyes gleamed as she understood, and practised the duck and slide across Sasha's sword arm several more times.
“Just don't let him hit you with the fucking shield,” Sasha continued, demonstrating with the invisible shield, aiming for Yasmyn's head. “He'll go high, like this, but with his weight into it….”
“If I go under it,” Yasmyn decided, doing that, “he's defenceless.”
“Yes. Cut him through the middle as you go.” Yasmyn's stick slapped Sasha's stomach, and she spun out and away. “Remember, heavy weaponry is good for mass combat, not for single combat. Weapons are only as useful as the tactics they allow you to employ. A naked warrior with a spoon can defeat a knight in full armour if he has the tactics to exploit a weakness.”
“Men coming,” called Bergen. Sasha walked to his side and looked out through the trees. Along the road, a group of men approached on foot. They wore the clothes of regular Ilduuri, and seemed armed.
Sasha noticed Bergen looking down at her. “What?” she asked.
“I heard infantry friends describing that for real, from the receiving end.” He jerked his head back toward where she'd been conducting the lessons with Yasmyn. “No wonder we lost so many.”