Richard Byers - The Shattered Mask

She stepped just a hair into the distance, inviting attack, and he obliged her with a feint at her knee, then jabbed a cut at her chest. She stepped forward and swept her blade from right to left. The captain of her father's household guard, the veteran soldier who'd given an importunate, boisterous little girl her first instruction in swordplay, had taught her it was foolish to try such an action. If her opponent thwarted her attempt to defend, her own advance would likely carry her onto his blade. But Shamur didn't fail. She'd sensed exactly where and how Thamalon's true attack would come, and she bashed his sword aside and cut with her own.

Thanks to her advance, she was dangerously close, and he scrambled backward. Feinting and disengaging repeatedly, she pursued him.

He kept retreating, the long sword whirling and leaping from side to side and up and down as he searched for her blade. But perhaps she'd unconsciously assimilated his favorite patterns, the ones he fell into when pressed so hard he had not an instant to think, for she anticipated and avoided every parry. Each spring of her long legs brought her point a little closer to his flesh, and she thought that here at last was the phrase that would end with her broadsword buried in his vitals.

Then the heel of his back foot caught on something hidden beneath a drift of snow. He stumbled, his sword arm flailing too wide to have any hope of deflecting her attack. She truly had him now, and he knew it; she could read the knowledge in his stricken expression. There was no panic there, but frustration and a final flare of defiance.

Screaming, she cut at his neck.

And then pulled the broadsword up over his head a split second before it could strike home.

She hadn't known she was going to spare him, and it took her a moment to understand why. Though his arguments hadn't persuaded her, they'd carried a certain weight, and more telling still had been the fact that up until the very end, when he'd despaired of ever convincing her, he hadn't once attempted a mortal blow.

He'd always cut and thrust at her limbs, never her torso or head. His reluctance to take her life even to protect his own suggested more powerfully than words that perhaps he wasn't the fiend she'd thought him after all.

How strange to discover that somewhere down deep in her mind, she'd been working toward such a conclusion, without even knowing it until now.

Thamalon recovered his balance, came back on guard, but made no threatening actions. "I take it you've had a change of heart," he said.

"Shut up!" she snarled, for her anger had by no means dissipated. The resentment that had smoldered in her heart for thirty years, and which the tale of the poisoning had fanned into full-blown hatred, still burned inside her. but now it was muddled with doubt and other painful feelings she couldn't even identify.

"Forgive me," Thamalon said gently, "I wasn't trying to mock you. Why don't we put our swords up?"

"You might as well," said a mild tenor voice.

Shamur whirled. At the perimeter of the snowy glade, figures wavered into view, evidently emerging from some sort of glamour that had rendered them invisible before. Most were men armed with crossbows and blades of various sorts. Judging from their bearing, they knew how to use such weapons, but she didn't think they were warriors, or at least, not the sort of warriors whom any honorable lord would recruit for his retinue. Their paucity of body armor, tawdry finery, slouching postures, smirks, and sneers all suggested the bully and the bravo. They'd stationed themselves around the edge of the clearing so as to surround the Uskevren, whose final passage of arms had carried them back to the center of the open space.

Standing safely behind a pair of the ruffians was a man about as tall as Thamalon, his features concealed behind an ambiguously smiling crescent-shaped Man in the Moon mask. His robe and cloak were dark, and he held a black, knobbed staff in his pallid hand. Behind him, indistinct in the failing twilight, its shape subtly altering as it shifted from one foot to the other, was some sort of animate shadow. Shamur inferred that the pair were a wizard and his familiar.

"I imagine this is the fellow who attempted to gull you," Thamalon said calmly.

"I deserve most of the credit," said the shadow, and Shamur jumped, because the spirit had spoken in an exact imitation of Lindrian's labored, quavering voice.

"I did gull her," said the mage, ignoring his spectral attendant, "she just didn't follow through." He turned his head toward Shamur. The gloaming turned the mask's eye holes into pits of shadow. She used his regard as an excuse to take a leery step backward. "It's too bad you didn't opt to murder him in his sleep, Lady Uskevren. Then he wouldn't have had the opportunity to talk you out of it."

"I must compliment you on your skill at chicanery," Thamalon said. "Ordinarily, Shamur is nobody's fool."

"I suspect she enjoys thinking the worst of you," the wizard said, "and that helped."

'Tricking us is one thing," Shamur said. "But how did you and your men get out here in the woods?"

"We tracked you," the shadow said, "veiled in Master's spells of concealment."

"You see, my lady," said the wizard, "I made quite extensive plans for your husband's destruction. In addition to manipulating you, I put a watch on Stormweather Towers, and when you two rode out alone, we followed. And thank goodness for that, because this way, everything works out. While you failed to kill Thamalon, you did lure him far away from his retainers, and I daresay that my associates and I won't have a great deal of difficulty disposing of the both of you ourselves."

"Your bravos could have shot us down as we dueled," Shamur said.

"You mustn't get your hopes up because of that," the magician said. "I'm afraid that you too must die. It was just that I don't believe in revealing myself to an enemy unnecessarily, even when I hold every advantage. Besides, it would have gratified my sense of irony had Thamalon, who has survived the attentions of so many ill-wishers, perished at the hands of his own wife."

"Who are you?" Thamalon asked.

"Lord Uskevren," the wizard said in mock distress, "you wound me. How could you forget-"

As the mage spoke, Shamur took a second subtle step backward, positioning herself beside the broken lantern. Nimbly as a juggler, she suddenly tossed her broadsword from her right hand to her left and kicked the lamp up into the air. She grabbed it, pivoted, and hurled it at a cross-bowman on the opposite side of the clearing from the mage.

By the time the missile smashed the bravo in the face, she was sprinting after it, and Thamalon, who had, Mask be thanked, reacted instantly, was pounding along beside her. But the crossbows! She zigzagged to throw off the shooters' aim, then dived to the ground when she heard the ragged, snapping chorus of the weapons discharging their bolts. Unscathed, she leaped back up, and another quarrel, loosed by a bravo who'd taken his time, thrummed past her temple, yanking at strands of her long, pale hair as it passed.

She glanced at Thamalon and saw that, miraculously, he hadn't been hit, either. Evidently, surprise and the darkness had spoiled their enemies' aim. He gave her a nod, and they raced on.

Though his brow was gashed and his nose, pulped, the rogue Shamur had struck with the lantern was still on his feet, and she was running straight at his leveled crossbow. She watched his trigger finger, praying that despite the darkness, she'd see it move. Then it did twitch, the weapon clacked and twanged, and she threw herself to the side.

The quarrel grazed her arm. Snarling at the sudden sting, she charged the rogue, her sword extended to complete the ruin of his face.