Sasha found that she could not move. Her booted feet remained anchored, her previous calm slipping as the blood began to pound in her ears. She would kill this man to suit her purposes. He was ignorant. He did not know what he faced. Suddenly, she saw before her not a hated northerner, a peddler of spite and bigotry, but just a man, the same as any other. He had a father and a mother, and more family besides. He seemed to have perhaps thirty summers, and so probably he had a wife and children, also. Surely there were many who loved him. She had killed men before in battle, who were trying to kill her at the time. This was… something completely different.
Krystoff's coffin, open before the altar of the Saint Ambellion Temple. She had worn a white dress and held a white lily in her hands. Remembered numbness. A black, all-encompassing grief. She had wanted the service to be grand, to do justice to the great, gaping void that had opened in her world. To do justice to Krystoff. To the way he had made her feel when he smiled at her, or laughed at her humour, or hugged her and made her feel warm and loved as no one else in that grey, formal world had ever made her feel.
The funeral had failed miserably to do any of that. She had concluded in her grief and despair that everything was fake and nothing that she knew was worth keeping. She had smashed things and attacked her minders; refused to eat for days on end. That day at the funeral, even more than the day she had learned of Krystoff's death, she had truly become an unbeliever. All of their rules, all the ceremony, all the fancy clothes and pompous manners, and her father's strict and formal habits… it was all a great, stupid fraud. She'd always suspected it. That day, she'd had proof.
Something now drew her gaze down to both lightly gloved hands, grasped in a tight, unthinking grip about the hilt of her sword. Strong hands, calloused in all the right places. She'd worked hard and gleefully on those callouses when Kessligh had first brought her to Baerlyn. Her hands then had been the hands of a little girl-soft and pale. Kessligh had given her the hard, capable hands of a warrior and she loved him for that. But for all his lessons, his relentless training, high standards and cryptic wisdom, the lore of the Nasi-Keth alone could not give those hands the strength they required for the task at hand. The Nasi-Keth were an idea to her. A wonderful idea, full of promise and the prospect of a brighter future for all. But that idea remained in the future, beyond the reach of the present.
And her present… she took a deep, cold breath as it came to her, slowly, yet with the building force of revelation. Her present had been stories from old Cranyk before the fireplace of his old, creaking house near the training hall-tales of great deeds and heroic warriors, of pride and honour, and all the things that made life worth living. Her present was an evening at the Steltsyn Star with music and dance, and friends, and laughing so hard that she nearly cried. Her present was the tradition of the Wakening, the wise scolding of the women, the worship of the spirits that dwelled in all living things and that overpowering, timeless bond with the natural world.
Those things had been her present since the time she had arrived from Baen-Tar. Lost and disconnected from the world, the wisdom and humour of the Goeren-yai had come to make her feel whole again. They had reassured her that life was indeed a great and noble thing, and well worth treating as such. Kessligh had given her the hands of a warrior and the mind of a thinker… yet it was the Goeren-yai who had relit the fire in her heart. She took another deep breath, shoulders heaving, poised within the tachadar circle with a serrin blade in her hands. The confusion lifted and suddenly all was clear. She was Goeren-yai. And it was simple.
She moved forward, barely aware that they were her steps, like paws upon the wet, morning grass. Her vision seemed to burn unnaturally sharp and she could almost count the bristles on Farys's broad chin. She may have never done this before, but the Goeren-yai had practised its like for as long as there had been people in Lenayin. She stood upon the sacred ground of countless previous battles, watched by the eyes of countless reincarnated souls. The cycle was never-ending and this moment was nothing so rare and precious as she had imagined. It was merely her turn, that was all, and the surge of ancient fury lit a fire in her veins.
Her blade moved to the starting pose with barely a thought. The posture felt a model of muscular perfection, the feet spread to shoulder width, the knees slightly bent, poised with a coiled, motionless power. Her grip on the sword had never felt so firm and secure. Her breathing came calm and impossibly, deadeningly slow. Her heart barely seemed to beat at all. The world felt so calm. So still. She savoured the moment. She did not want it to end.
Farys moved. A shift in footwork brought his blade slashing for her neck. It seemed only natural that her own posture should shift in turn, a foot sliding back as the hands came up, an intersection of steel at the shoulders, a brace of perfect power through arms, back and legs. Farys's blade deflected effortlessly by, glancing from her swinging edge like a skate on ice. She could perhaps have finished it then with his guard exposed in the follow-through, the commonest form of death for regular fighters against the svaalverd… yet the perfection was lacking and the feet could not quite position for the stroke the hands desired.
He recovered fast and pressed the attack. This time, there were no enormous follow-throughs, as if someone had thought to coach him what not to do. Sasha retreated, a step to each stroke as their facing shifted, countering one, and another, and then another in a clever, deceptive combination that swung at the last moment to an unexpected, high-quarter slash from an interrupted backswing. But it was the simplest, most beautiful thing in the world to shift her guard from low to high, switching the retreating foot to rear and rotating that defence into a fast, offensive cut.
Farys survived only with a desperate, downward slam of his blade, but his left foot failed the transition, and so she swung to that side instead. His frantic parry barely made it in time, and his balance not at all as he stumbled back a step… and that necessary movement opened the way for the most exquisite shift of balance to her forward pivot foot, as the blade circled to his low, right quarter and slashed him cleanly open from right hip to left shoulder.
Farys stumbled back, slowly collapsing as his eyes stared in disbelief. Blood spurted in a horrid flood, drenching vest and legs, and he crumpled in a motionless heap on the grass. Sasha held that posture, blade held high in final flourish, arm perfectly extended from the shoulder, feet at the precise position and angle. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever done, that killing stroke. So perfect. So supreme. She gazed up at the lethal, gleaming edge, almost bloodless with the speed of her strike, and marvelled at her own magnificence.
Of the horrified gasps, cries and then yells from the Hadryn surrounding, she was only dimly aware. Of the sudden roar from the Halleryn walls, beyond the silent pause that followed Farys's fall, even less so. Except that suddenly, there was a sound of rumpling cloth, a cloak thrown back and a high, metallic slide of a small blade leaving its sheath.
A desperate yell came from the perimeter's friendly side and she spun, aware only of an onrushing threat, her blade slashing to meet it
… and struck the knife from midair, sending it spinning into the nearby turf. The thrower himself was felled a moment later, clutching another knife in his neck, and then there were men breaking the circle on all sides in a flurry of dropping cloaks and flashing blades.