Once A Hero

  I awoke from my rest in midafternoon, which was a bit sooner than I had intended and a lot sooner than my body desired. Still, Aarundel's insistent demands that I wake up cut through the sleep cocoon in which my consciousness rested, so I sat up and rubbed sleepsand from my eyes. I had planned to ask him what could possibly be more important than sleep, but the raptured expression on his face answered me immediately.

  "Come with me, Neal. Come, come." He pulled me to my feet, then waited impatiently as I stretched. "Neal!" he whispered emphatically and jerked his head toward the north.

  I followed him as quickly as I could, and my eyes slowly focused on a form standing at the edge of the circle. Even my sluggish brain could determine that the dark-haired, gown-clad person had to be Marta. I smiled at that realization and picked up my pace, then raked fingers back through my hair to clear it away from my face.

  At that point I knew Aarundel saw in me more of a friend than even he would have imagined. I had been riding for two days and a fortnight and looked it. Worse yet, I smelled like it. My beard had not been razor-slain since leaving Aurium, and while my tunic had been washed and wrung out twice since then, it looked more ready for burning than wearing. I had imagined washing up and preparing a proper image for when I met his Marta, but that chance had gone the way of the sheep Shijef had stolen.

  None of my concerns would have mattered at all to Aarundel. His Marta had come out to see him, to welcome him, and he wanted her to meet me. I hoped, as I hurried along, that she loved him deeper than the hole I wished would swallow me up, because it would take a lot of love to excuse my pitiful appearance. Then again, if she didn't love him that much, scaring her off at this point would be the best thing I could do for him.

  Slowing just a hair so I could pare the grime from beneath my fingernails, I approached the couple. I stopped short a good Man-length from them and shifted so I'd be more downwind than up. Holding hands together, they were lost in each other's eyes and didn't notice me until I cleared my throat.

  Aarundel blinked, then blushed a bit and extended his left hand in my direction. "Doma Marta, this is Neal Roclawzi, the one I have named Custos Sylvanii. Neal, this is my heart-twin, my vitamoresti. Lady Marta."

  I bowed deeply to her. "This is an honor I have long awaited."

  "The honor is mine, Custos Sylvanii."

  For the next two seconds we said nothing and appraised each other. I know I got the better of the exchange, for her exquisite beauty meant I could have watched her for a good long time without complaint. Tall enough to look me even in the eyes, she had a slender grace and noble bearing the equal of which I had never seen before. She wore her dark hair shorter even than Aarundel or me, and it molded itself to her head and the back of her neck with tight curls. Her blue eyes and bright smile made me feel welcome and told me she well understood how the hardships of the journey had left their mark on me.

  I looked over at Aarundel. "My friend, until this day I have envied you nothing. Now I envy your tremendous fortune in sharing love with this sylvanesti."

  Aarundel laughed aloud and kissed Marta on the forehead. "I shall do all I am able to be worthy of your envy, my friend." He smiled at Marta, then looked beyond me toward the glade surrounding the circle. "You did not tell me she rode out with you."

  Marta nodded. "While you slept, she decided to gather herbs and flowers."

  Aarundel's smile grew and he waved his left hand. "Neal, it is also my pleasure to present to you my sister, Larissa."

  I turned back toward the rustling in the brush with an easy smile on my face and laid my eyes on the most beautiful female the gods had ever blessed with life.

  Chapter 9:

  The Magick Of Battle

  Early Spring

  A.R. 499

  The Present

  ***

  THE SMILE ON the Haladina's face died when his flashdrake failed to fire. Gena concentrated for a second, then opened her hands in his direction. A burning spark sped at the man with the straight-line accuracy of a bee. It swerved once, at the end, darting down from his face to the powder horn dangling near his waist. The magickal ember pierced it, melting the Haladina's look of surprise into a mask of horror.

  The powder horn's explosion launched the raider into the air. His longgunne fell one way, and, trailing thick white smoke, his limp body went another. From the corner of her eye Gena saw him hit the ground and bounce loose-limbed and bloody.

  Knowing he was dead, she turned her attention to the four Haladina racing in at Berengar. A disorienting sensation passed through her as she turned her head. She recognized it as the aftereffects of casting two spells in haste, but that did not stop it from upsetting her balance and driving her to one knee. Her right hand closed on sand and pine needles as she caught herself.

  Forcing nausea away, she prepared another spell.

  Before she could cast it, the swiftest of the Haladina had reached Berengar. The smaller Haladina yipped his war cry, but Berengar drowned it out with a roar that would have pleased the tiger on his crest. The count caught the man's overhand saber cut on the forte of his rapier, then pivoted on his left foot and snapped a kick at the Haladina's leg. Berengar's right heel hit the man on the knee, snapping it straight, then carrying through to break it back in the other direction.

  Taking a deep breath, Gena concentrated and felt power pulse down her arm and into the handful of dirt. She raised it up and threw it, releasing it in an arc going from high right to low left. Her arm fell leaden to her side. Exhausted, she shivered and watched as her sand spray hit two of the remaining Haladina bent on Berengar's destruction.

  The ribbon of sand slashed at the men as if it were a stony whip. The very tip of it swept away the furthest man's ear and polished to shining the metal trinkets hanging on his vest. He found himself involuntarily twisted back to his right. His momentum carried him forward, but the broken rhythm of his steps caused him to falter and fall to his knees at the outer edge of Berengar's sword-arc.

  Vertigo twisted her insides, but she saw the man closer to her stopped in midrun. Air exploded from his lungs as the sand-scream lashed his torso. The sand ate through his woolen vest, the tunic below it, and the flesh beneath that like strong acid. Gena thought she saw white ribs, then the man's legs flew out from beneath him, and he landed hard on his back, obscuring her view of his ruined chest.

  The last Haladin raider rushing in at Berengar suddenly found himself alone instead of being the left flank of a united front. Berengar sidestepped to his right, then pivoted out of the way of the Haladina's weak cross-body slash. The second that blade passed, Berengar whipped his blade across the back of the Haladina's legs, slicing through muscles and dropping the man screaming to the sand.

  A thrust through the throat finished the one-eared raider. Berengar looked up from him to the other man felled by magick, then jogged over to where Gena knelt huddled against the ground. She let her head drop down as he approached, heard the sound of his rapier being thrust into the sand, and felt his strong hands on her shoulders.

  "Are you hurt. Lady Genevera?"

  She coughed and wiped the sweat from her brow with her right hand. That smeared dirt across it, a fact that registered in her mind, but seemed decidedly trivial as Berengar's bodyguards finished the last of the Haladina. "Just tired. Combat casting is usually not difficult. If you have some preparation. Ambush means reacting without much forethought."

  Berengar smiled and helped her sit upright. "If not for you, I would be dead. The Haladina with the flashdrake would have killed me." He glanced back over his shoulder at where the man's smoking body lay. "How did you save me?"

  Gena smiled weakly. "The first spell taught to any student of the Art, for obvious reasons, involves extinguishing fires. Rik has explained to me and showed me that what happens in a flashdrake is fire building up behind the ball. Being familiar with the idea, and having discussed it before, I just put the fire out."

  "Then you put fire in his fuel box."

/>   Gena nodded and licked sweat from her upper lip. "That was easy. Making fire is the second spell most magicians learn."

  Berengar laughed lightly. "And the sand?"

  "I would have thought you too busy to notice that."

  "I have forced myself to be aware of everything on a battlefield. Awareness is the key to winning." He gestured behind himself. "At this end of the field we have five men down, three dead, and two badly wounded. At the other end I have two wounded men and seven Haladina dead. Had I not been aware of what was happening, I would have helped my men finish off the raiders before coming to speak with you."

  "I am impressed."

  "As I am with you. Now, about the sand."

  Gena sighed heavily. "I improvised with a spell used to enchant arrows to carry further from bows. It expands the time during which they accelerate from release to leaving the bow. My mistake came in that the spell is normally used on a dozen arrows or so, hence the requirement in energy is low. In my use, which was sloppy and hasty, each grain of sand became an arrow. While each required less energy than an arrow, there were far more of them." Looking down at her hands, she laughed. "If my hands were bigger, I could have killed myself."

  "Can you ride? We can stay here if you need to rest."

  "I will be fine after a moment." Gena shook her head. "Thank you."

  "My duty, honor, and pleasure, Lady Genevera."

  One of the bodyguards came over and stood beside Berengar. "Begging pardon, m'lord, but you left two alive. Do you want me to take care of them?"

  "If you please, yes, Darrian."

  Gena looked up. "I can still help heal, if you wish. I am getting my strength back."

  Berengar shook his head. "Darrian will finish them, not patch them up."

  "Kill them?"

  "Yes. If I take them prisoner, I have to feed them. They will provide me with no useful information. If ransomed, their parole will be worthless because they wiil come back at me." Berengar frowned heavily. "I know it seems barbaric—something from the time of Neal, perhaps—but the only thing the Haladina understand is death. They are not civilized. If you are to be understood, you must speak to them in the manner which they will understand."

  The count stood and walked over to where his men dragged the Haladin bodies into a rough line. Gena wondered at how the man could order their deaths so casually, then bother to kneel and straighten their limbs. Berengar saw to it that each dead man's hands clutched his sword hilt to his chest, after the usual manner of Haladin burial. He did not allow his men to take the gems from their teeth—both in burial and the lack of looting he paid the Haladina more respect than Rik had.

  Gena shivered again, but not from fatigue. She had long heard the argument about what the Haladina might or might not understand, but before, it had always been directed by members of the Consilliarii at Humanity as a whole, not just the Haladina. Though the discussion had raged for centuries before her birth—had raged since the time when the children of the gods saw fit to create Men—as she had grown up, Berengar's ideological counterparts among the Elves were seen as being trapped in the past, They made up the majority of Elves who had chosen to travel excedere and abandon the mortal world for the gods' paradise.

  She had often tried to understand their arguments, but no one raised in her family could have agreed with them. Gena did concede that Humanity often acted without forethought and due consideration, but she argued often and long that what might be seen as a racial trait did not include each and every Man. Those she most often debated quickly learned to bait her by dismissing her points with the phrase, "Neal Gustos Sylvanii aside . . ."

  The shift in attitude among Elves concerning Men had been far simpler to accomplish than changing Berengar's mind would be. While it was true that since the time of Neal, Men had not encroached on Elven territory, Berengar saw the Haladina as an immediate danger to his family and his future. As one of her teachers had commented, "The theory of a thing is often easier to comprehend than the doing of it." The threat Berengar felt to family and home from the raiders meant that he reacted in the most direct and forceful way that he could to forestall and defeat that threat.

  She hugged her arms around herself and rubbed some warmth into her upper arms. Berengar's concern for seeing that the Haladina were buried marked him as more complex than a man who hates solely on the basis of difference. He respected the Haladina and their traditions. He did not allow his men to defile their bodies. The graves they dug might not be as deep as they would be for his own men, nor would he raise a monument to mark them, but he would not just leave them for the wolves, either. He honored his foes in defeat.

  Gena stood up and wandered out to where Berengar examined the Haladin flashdrake. Though it had to have been quite heavy, the count handled it easily and studied it closely enough that he did not hear her approach. When she came into his circle of vision, he looked up and smiled, then frowned quickly and shook his head. "A horrible weapon, this."

  He held it out for her inspection. It looked to be as long as Durriken was tall and had a pitted gray octagonal barrel with a silver bead mounted on the tip as a sight. The stock and foregrip had been made of the same type of wood, but were in two pieces. Silver straps bound the foregrip to the barrel nearly halfway along its length. The stock, which had been inlaid with bits of ivory and had a silver butt cap, joined the barrel at the last quarter of its length and housed the trigger and talon mechanism. The ramrod was missing, but a hole drilled lengthwise in the foregrip and another at the nose of the stock marked where it should have resided.

  "I have witnessed the type of wounds they are capable of inflicting, my lord. I would agree that they are horrible. By the same measure, however, the wounds caused by an arrow or crossbow bolt or even a sword are likewise horrible."

  "Yes, but their use requires skill and training." Berengar brandished the gunne. "This requires no skill. There is no honor in using it."

  "I would imagine, my lord, that the first stick-wielding man hit by a thrown rock uttered the same refrain."

  Berengar laughed aloud. "A point well made and deeply taken. I know Durriken uses flashdrakes, and I do not mean to imply he has no honor. His are Dwarven. His possession of them is a mark of respect of him by the Dwarves and, from what I understand, their respect takes a great deal of earning. This, on the other hand, is a poorly constructed Haladin imitation. Had you not quenched the fire in it, it likely would have exploded in the Haladina's face."

  He looked ready to break it and bury it, but Gena stopped him. "I believe, my lord, if we bring it back to Durriken, he might be able to tell us something about it. It could be important, especially if more than one in a dozen Haladina are supplied with them."

  "That is a good idea." Berengar dispatched two of his men to round up the Haladina horses while the others finished digging the graves with the steel caps taken from two of the dead raiders. Berengar took his turn digging, which surprised and pleased Gena.

  The burying of the dead and the ride back to Aurdon proved quiet work, and Gena did nothing to prompt conversation. She let her body regain its strength on the ride back, and the leisurely pace the group adopted guaranteed the sun would set an hour or two before they made it back to the city. She suggested stopping for the night at Lake Orvir, but Berengar vetoed her idea, pointing out that stopping at the unused manor house would raise great alarm among those people expecting them back in Aurdon.

  She quickly imagined Rik's reaction and bowed to Berengar's wisdom. He reassured her that despite the string of Haladin horses making them look like a caravan of horse traders bound for the city, he expected no more trouble. "We will be home soon enough, m'lady, hale, hearty, and for your part, I hope, rested."

  As she rode, she watched Berengar and slowly integrated the different pieces and sides of him she had seen. From her earliest meeting with him, she knew him to be well mannered, gracious, handsome, and a student of folklore. Of his intelligence there was no doubt at all. His summons
told her he was concerned for his family and for the people of Aurdon. The way he treated Rik marked his generosity, and his harshness in dealing with Waldo paralleled her own dislike for the little man.

  In battle he was a worthy heir to the Red Tiger, matching the legendary leader in size, coloration, and demeanor. In the sparring match she had witnessed on her arrival in Aurdon, she had seen a man quite skilled in all the finer points of dueling. At the Haladin camp he had proved singularly efficient at killing—a remorseless and implacable foe. Even so he had shown respect for his enemies, honoring them as valiant combatants, not treating them as soon-to-be-carrion.

  Fitting all the pieces together, Gena found herself comparing each against a standard she had not realized she held in her mind. At first she thought she might be judging him in comparison to Durriken, but were that so, she knew she would find stranger and greater differences than she did. She also knew that Durriken would appear, in many ways, to be the lesser of the two men, and she knew that was not true, for there was no real way to compare them.

  But if she was not comparing Berengar to Durriken, who was she using to measure him? Not the Red Tiger. She knew next to nothing about him. He was a footnote to the adventures of her grandfather and Neal Custos Sylvanii. Neal? She knew that was the right answer to her question, but it struck her as wrong as well. She only knew Neal from legends and songs—no man could compare favorably with a legend.

  Despite that impossibility, Berengar fought hard. He showed the same willingness to pitch in and help his men that had made so many loyal to Neal. They both were intelligent and fierce fighters, and they both had long careers fighting the Haladina. Each man thought about more than just himself, and did things to stabilize not only his time but the future.

  They are much alike. Gena shook her head. Is there anything Neal did that Berengar could not do?

  It took her a moment, but when she thought of it, she found she could not replace her mental image of Neal with that of Berengar in the same position. A little laugh escaped her, and she felt relieved that in the twilight no one could see her blush. "No," she whispered to herself, "no, you are far too proud. Count Berengar Fisher, to have survived admittance to Cygestolia."