Martin Hengst - The Last Swordmage

He sprang to his feet, pivoting away from her. Spinning on a heel, he brought his other leg around and slammed his boot into the top of her foot. She gave a satisfying scream and stumbled backwards. Another spinning kick caught her in the stomach, knocking the wind out of her in a rush. She crashed into the wall and slid to the floor, her eyes dull and glassy.

“I may be three decades your elder, little one, but I'm stronger, faster, and more agile than you. If you aim to kill me, you better practice your stealth and subterfuge. You are clumsy and you have no style. You're not even a worthy opponent. You fall easily and without effort. Hardly a challenge.”

The light returned to her eyes and she glared up at him, flashing a hand gesture in his direction that was better suited for brothels and taverns. If nothing else, he thought with a shake of his head, he had to respect her tenacity. She wasn't going to stop fighting him without being broken first, and until she learned to when not to fight, she wouldn't learn anything else.

“Do you want these?” he asked, holding the keys just out of her reach and jingling them. Mocking her with them.

She nodded.

“Then come get them.” He placed the keys on the table and stood, his arms crossed across his wide chest.

The girl pushed herself up, slowly sliding back up the wall to a standing position. She was still shackled, which was going to make any attack she made that much more difficult, but he wanted to see her try. There was a lot he could learn just by observing and it wasn't in her nature to back down. She would fail before she turned away from the fight. Royce was certain.

Her eyes flicked to the wall beside her and Royce tried to guess which weapon she'd grab first. Nearest to her hand was a long halberd, lying horizontally on the wall across its pegs. She hefted it experimentally and winced, but didn't cry out. Royce knew that pain well; he had felt it every day of his life.

There was a naturally occurring phenomenon that plagued all Quintessentialists, those who channeled the raw forces of magic. Mages could not wield weapons of iron or steel. Even close proximity to the metal was enough to disrupt their tenuous connection to the Quintessential Sphere; the realm of time and essence, from which all magic flowed. That disruption, like a fire in the blood, was quickly fatal to the Quintessentialist. In minutes, or hours, eating away at their mind until there was nothing left but an empty shell.

Royce was different, as had been his father, and his father before him. He was a swordmage, one who could wield a steel blade in one hand and the full power of the sphere in the other. It was a fearsomely powerful concordance of skills, but one that came at a terrible price. The disruption that came to all mages came also to the swordmage, it just came slower. A glacial crawl opposed to a flash freeze.

Tiadaria had that same skill. He had known it from the first time he touched her. The link-shock that coursed through their bodies when they touched was the power of the sphere dancing between them. Now she stood before him, learning to master the pain. He saw her knuckles go white and watched the tip of the wicked blade as it sliced a wide arc toward his mid-section.

At the apogee of its stroke, he took a single step back, neatly avoiding the slashing weapon. Her lips curled back against her teeth and he grinned at her, mocking her.

“Come child,” he teased. “Don't you come from the Frozen Frontier? I thought all the clansmen were fearsome fighters? Oh…but you're just a girl, and a baby at that. I guess I shouldn't expect you to put up much of a fight.”

Her eyes narrowed and Royce knew that his goading was getting to her. She was stubborn, and resourceful, but she lacked patience. Something that he could exploit and would get her killed if she wasn't careful.

Another swipe of the blade and another step back. This time, she didn't hesitate as she brought the blade back across their path. She was driving him back. She wanted him out of reach of the keys so she could snatch them up. Let her think she was succeeding, he thought. She'd have that much more to lose when she realized her error.

One final swipe of the blade brought her within arm’s reach of the keys and she dropped the halberd, lunging for the ring. As the weapon fell, Royce caught the shaft with the tip of his foot and flipped it up into his hand. Careful that his grip didn't slide down into the blade, he spun in a tight circle, slamming the pole into the small of her back and knocking her forward over the table. The keys spun out of her reach, sliding off the table and landing near the hearth.

Easily reversing the weapon, he advanced on her with malice in his eyes and a sneer of contempt twisting his lips. She rolled to one side, trying to avoid the tip of the blade as it came very near her unprotected face. She rolled until she was up against the wall and had nowhere to go. Stone on one side and steel on the other, she was well and truly trapped.

“Yield,” he demanded, pressing the tip of the blade against her throat.

“No,” she snarled and slid sideways, kicking up her legs and fouling the blade of the halberd in the chain of her shackles. Twisting the lower half of her body, she wrenched the weapon from his grasp. Momentarily free from threat, she snake-crawled toward the keys.

He let her get her hand within a few inches of the key ring before he seized her by the hair, putting a knee in the small of her back and the blade of his belt dagger to her exposed throat. He drew his blade across, ever so lightly, drawing a bead of blood that slipped under the blade of his knife and down the pale skin of her neck.

“Yield, little one, or die.” She was stubborn and full of vengeance, but she wasn’t stupid. Royce expected her to yield when she was bested and she did just that.

“I yield to you, Sir.”

The tension went out of her body and she went limp on the floor under him. He plucked up the keys and tucked them back in his pocket, then offered the girl his handkerchief, which she used to mop the blood from the superficial wound. He cleaned the blade on the leg of his pants and then slipped it back into its sheath.

“You have a certain amount of raw talent, girl. That move with the chains was brilliant. You need to learn to focus your anger, and you need to learn patience.”

She scowled at him but didn't answer. He sat down beside her, his back against the wall. They were almost shoulder to shoulder, but the few inches between them might as well have been the deepest crevasse on all of Solendrea.

“Can you teach me to fight like you do?” She finally asked, looking across the room, pointedly not meeting his cool regard.

“Not if you don't trust me,” he replied. It was an honest answer, if a complicated one. He could certainly teach her the techniques without her trust, but for her to live up to his expectations, to his plans, she would need to trust him implicitly.

“I don't,” she said quietly. “I can't.”

“I know.”

They sat in quiet contemplation for quite some time before Royce reached into his pocket and took out his keys. He offered them to her, hanging on one finger.

“How about we work on that? Starting right now?”

The look she gave him was plainly doubtful. Her eyes narrowed and Royce wondered if this vengeful creature would ever trust anyone about anything. “What’s the trick?”

Royce sighed. “There is no trick, little one. I’m offering you the opportunity to trust that when I say I’m going to do something, I do it.”

“What’s in it for you?”

“Not having to put up with quite as much of your nonsense, hopefully?”

The girl sat in contemplative silence for so long that Royce was certain that she was going to elect to keep the shackles instead of trusting him. He really couldn’t blame her. She had no idea who he was or what he had done. To her, he was just another man looking to use her for his own nefarious purposes. He wanted to use her, Royce thought. That much was true. The nefarious part, that remained to be seen.