Martin Hengst - The Last Swordmage

“What’s your name, girl?”

“Darcy,” she said in a sing-song voice that sent a chill up Royce’s spine.

“Did you kill a girl, Darcy?”

The little blond girl smiled a smile so wide and white that it put Royce in mind of the predatory fish that sometimes washed up on the shore at Blackbeach.

“Oh, yes. I killed her dead. I beat her down until she bled. In the head! Now she’s dead.” The girl cackled. “Dead! Bled! Dead! Bled!”

Royce shook his head and dropped the hood back over her head. He nodded soberly to the executioner and retreated to his station. The blade man pressed the girl’s head to the block and an instant later, the crowd roared with approval. The executioner kicked the body off the platform, into a straw-filled cart parked below. Royce felt sick.

“Justice is done,” the Magistrate remarked.

The Constable remained silent.

The village crier called for the next condemned and there was a commotion at the foot of the steps leading to the platform. There was a girl in chains, desperately fighting against the guards who struggled to keep her in place. Though she was shackled at wrist and ankle, she still fought, trying to tear the weapons from the belts of the men-at-arms attending her.

As the guards tried to march her up the short stairs, the girl went to ground, falling so quickly that the men had little time to react. When she hit the ground, she scrambled away as quickly as her bindings would allow. She was quick, but not quick enough. One of the guards ran her down and taking a blackjack from a belt loop, thwacked her soundly in the back of the head. The girl went limp, face down in the dirt. They lifted her under the arms and dragged her up the steps into the platform, her feet dangling between them. They dumped her at the executioner's feet.

Royce watched as the ax man lifted the girl’s body and placed her head in the block. The blow to the back of the head had knocked her senseless. Though her eyes were open, she was staring at some point far across a distant horizon. She also wore a witchmetal collar, its thin gray band a stark contrast against her pale skin. Her eyes were a deep, clear blue; the color of sapphire. Hair the color of corn flax dropped to her shoulders in a tangled mass. There had obviously been neither comb, nor brush, nor looking glass in whatever dank hole she had been assigned to for the night before her date with the sharp end of the blade.

She was definitely pretty, for a slave. Her nose was straight and unbroken, her eyes not sunken by years of abuse and neglect. She was newly collared then. A slave's life was notoriously hard and short, no matter how pretty they were. In fact, sometimes being pretty made it worse. There were those who would pay a premium for the chance to break such a lovely creature.

This one's high cheekbones and thick frame placed her in the far north before her capture. The Frozen Frontier, or very near, unless Royce missed his guess. He didn't. He was rarely wrong. There was something about her that piqued his curiosity. Something he couldn’t quite place his finger on. There was a resonance about her, something that made the hair on his arms stand on end.

The girl had roused enough to start to struggle again. Rather than suffer through a repeat of her games with the guards, the executioner locked her shackles to the block, rendering her thrashing mostly ineffective.

Royce went rigid as the executioner offered the girl a hood, which she declined in a spate of colorful curses and epithets. She turned her head as far as the block would allow and attempted to spit at the blade man.

“Don’t,” the Magistrate said quietly. “This one deserves it too, just as the last one did.”

The old soldier wasn’t so sure. He watched as the girl tried to spit at the executioner a second time. It was a futile gesture, but enough to earn her a backhanded slap across her high cheekbones with a thick leather gauntlet. The executioner put his boot between her shoulder blades, pressing her neck into the edge of the block. The ax gave a dull ring as it was drawn across the platform and lifted to his shoulder.

The executioner hefted the blade and Royce found himself riveted. Most people closed their eyes in that final moment, or opted for the hood. She didn't. She kept her eyes open and fixed on the platform mere inches beyond her nose. The ax man’s arms tensed for the swing and Royce sprang forward, landing on the balls of his feet. His hand flashed out, arresting the ax mid-stroke.

“Hold your blade,” he said quietly but firmly. The crowd groaned. They were growing tired of the interruptions in their entertainment. Two executions and both stopped at the penultimate moment. Their dissension spread like wildfire through those who had assembled.

A swarthy little man with a bulbous red nose waddled onto the platform, his face suffused purple with rage.

“Enough! What's the meaning of this? She needs to die, and die now! She's filth. Vermin. A pestilence to be destroyed.”

Royce eyed him up, studying the fine cut of the tunic, the flash of the large gems on each finger, the full purse tucked into his belt, the neck twisted and folded over to ensure that no coin could find its way out until it was called upon. He didn't know the man, but he knew the type. Royce raised an eyebrow and the ghost of a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.

“Who are you, tiny creature, to question the Constable, former Knight of the Flame and Sergeant-at-Arms to the One True King?”

Rocking back on his heels, the man seemed to deflate, his face going from rage to confusion, to fear. He was obviously used to barking orders and expecting them to be followed without challenge. Probably backed by the bite of a whip. Slavers. Royce snorted derisively. They were all the same.

“My name is Cerrin, Mi’lord. I am a purveyor of…resources, foreign and domestic.”

“What did this vermin do to have her neck placed on the block, slaver?”

The tips of the man's ears went red and he stammered a moment. He snapped his mouth shut and swallowed convulsively, then seemed to find his backbone.

“She’s a menace. She attacked one of the other girls without provocation. Killed her in cold blood that one did. She cost me good crowns and I’ll see to it that the others learn their place.” The girl’s spine went rigid as she fought against the restraints that held her down. It wasn’t hard for Royce to believe that she had killed another slave. She fought like a caged animal.

“I didn’t kill anyone, you filthy lying pig!” Spittle flew from her lips as the girl screamed at the little man. “Darcy was only defending herself and you know it!”

“Do you dispute her claim?” Royce asked, almost conversationally. He fixed such a piercing gaze on the slaver that Cerrin went white.

“Erm, no. Not exactly, Mi’lord.”

“So she didn’t kill directly? She was merely the cause of the, ah, altercation?”

“Yes. Yes! That’s it precisely, Mi’lord.” A smile flickered across the slaver’s face. “She was an accomplice!”

Royce dropped his hand from the executioner's ax and waved him away. He knelt beside the girl and flipped up her thin shift, exposing the pale skin of her back all the way up to her breast band. Her sides were mottled in the green, purple, and yellow of aging bruises. It was an old slaver trick. Keep them in line, but only where the paying customers can't see. He ran a calloused hand down her side and the girl shied away from the touch. There were new layers of bruises on top of old here. There was no telling how long she had been brutalized this way.

“So she's to lose her head,” Royce remarked quietly. “As an example for the others.”

Royce jerked his head at the other girls, chained wrist to wrist, each with a thin witchmetal collar, clustered at the edge of the square.