R. Salvatore - The Dame

Bransen and Jameston exchanged glances, both of them noting yet again that curious combination and juxtaposition of the major Honce religions. The ancient ones were Samhaist gods, the evergreen the sign of the Order of Blessed Abelle.

“If ye’re to sting him, then now’s the time or never’s the time,” one of the newcomers remarked.

“Him?” asked Bransen.

“Prince Milwellis,” the other newcomer clarified.

“Aye, that one came back mad because you and your friends stung him so hard the first time,” said the first. “So stick him again, we beg, and this time stick his own body, if ye’re getting me point.”

“He’s a dog what’s killed a thousand mothers and more than that o’ children,” said the man standing beside Bransen.

“To see his blood staining the waters o’ the Mirianic would do our hearts good when we come from Entel, and don’t ye doubt that we’ll be back,” said one of the others.

“Where is Affwin Wi?” Bransen asked. “Has she returned to the city?”

The three soldiers exchanged shrugs.

“She’s still out, I’m thinking,” said the one near Bransen. “Not far from here, last I heard.”

“Be gone,” Bransen told his prisoner and the others, and they were happy to oblige.

Bransen fixed his gaze on Jameston, who nodded solemnly and slipped back into the thick grove of pines, with Bransen close behind.

Two other sets of eyes watched the exchange between the strangers and the soldiers, all the more carefully when they took note of Bransen’s sword.

Merwal Yahna motioned to Pactset Va, and the two men slid away from the scene, no less silent than the black-clothed stranger carrying a sword he should not possess.

“Jhesta Tu,” Merwal reported to Affwin Wi soon after. “There is no doubt.”

“He wore our clothing,” said Pactset Va, a young and strong specimen with small dark eyes and his hair bound in a topknot. “And carried a sword as your own traced with vines.”

Affwin Wi drew her broken blade and rolled it over in surprisingly delicate hands that had many times driven right through the throat of an opponent. She looked to Merwal Yahna with an expression that was not hopeful. The Jhesta Tu had hunted them in Behr, but they had thought their mercenary stint with Laird Ethelbert would allow them reprieve from their continual trials against Affwin Wi’s former masters. Had they found her again?

Affwin Wi took some solace in the likelihood that this new mystic would be acting mostly alone; the Jhesta Tu considered the adjudication of the matter of a rogue like Affwin Wi to be a personal challenge for their disciples, whereas the Hou-lei traditions Affwin Wi had come to follow, much more forceful and warlike, called for as many warriors as needed, and then some more, for any given task. In simple terms, Hou-lei didn’t fight fairly. Three times before the great warrior had helped her fend off Jhesta Tu.

Since the Jhesta Tu’s companion in the woods earlier was surely not of Behr or Jhesta Tu, Affwin Wi had no reason to believe this time would be different.

Well, you do look like a southerner,” Jameston quipped as he and Bransen made their way to the southwest, tracing a wide perimeter of Ethelbert dos Entel. “You’ve got the skin for it.”

Bransen could only shrug. Though Jameston was teasing, his words were true enough. With his brown skin and jet black hair, the black clothing and his exotic sword, the Ethelbert warriors had thought him from Behr. And they understood the significance of his dress. “Affwin Wi,” he mumbled, and he found it hard to breathe. They were close; the Jhesta Tu were close.

“And what are you planning to do when we find these folk?” Jameston asked as if reading his mind, which was probably not a difficult thing to do at that moment.

“Learn from them,” he replied. “You cannot understand, but I am trapped in an infirm body.”

“Are you, then?” the scout asked, his eyebrows rising along with the sides of his mouth as he put on an incredulous grin.

“Without this,” Bransen explained, pointing to his brooch, “I am a helpless, babbling fool, the one you saw being dragged toward the glacier after the troll fight.”

“Wasn’t it a knock in the head?”

“A knock in the head that dislodged the gemstone,” Bransen explained.

Jameston nodded and smiled. “I wondered on that. I saw you walking-being dragged, actually-and thought you knocked silly beyond any chance of regaining your senses.”

Bransen lifted an eyebrow. “Thank you for the assistance.”

“Told you not to fight the damned trolls.”

Bransen let it go with a laugh, not willing to recount all those earlier questions at this pressing time.

“You think these strangers we’re hunting will free you of that stone?” Jameston asked.

Bransen saw that the scout didn’t understand. He was simply too edgy at that moment to go into great detail. “They will,” he replied.

He turned to glance at Jameston and ensure that the explanation would suffice just as the scout froze in his tracks, his eyes locked.

“Looks like we’re going to find out,” Jameston whispered out of the side of his mouth. Following his gaze to a pair of thick pines across a small open patch of ground, Bransen saw a warrior, lithe and strong with tightly wound muscles. His brow, furrowed and pronounced with the dark, thin lines of his eyebrows, made his black eyes seem even angrier, fiercer, an imposing appearance that grew only more so for his shaven head. He was dressed in black silk clothing akin to Bransen’s own and casually swung a strange weapon at the end of one arm, a pair of forearm-length solid wooden poles secured at their ends by a short length of leather.

“Nun’chu’ku,” Bransen mouthed as he considered the very deadly weapon he recognized from his lessons reading the Book of Jhest.

The warrior said something in a strange tongue, and Bransen tried to unwind the words. He knew the language from the book his father had penned, but he had never heard it spoken before. The warrior repeated his phrase, a demand from the insistent tone.

“You know what he’s saying, boy?” Jameston whispered.

“Something about Jhesta Tu,” Bransen answered, shaking his head. “Asking if I am Jhesta Tu, I think, but I cannot be certain.”

“Act certain, then,” Jameston replied.

“Jhesta Tu,” Bransen said loudly.

The warrior’s dark eyes narrowed immediately, and he began to walk slowly to their left, putting himself more in line with Bransen.

“Wrong answer,” Jameston said.

“Jhesta Tu?” Bransen asked this time, and he pointed at the warrior. That stopped the man in his pacing, and his expression turned more to curiosity.

“Who be you?” the warrior asked in the common tongue of Honce, though heavily accented in the dialect of Behr, a rolling and bouncing singsong effect of consonants bitten off and vowels exaggerated.

“I am Bransen Gari-” Bransen started, but he changed direction and said with confidence, “I am the son of Sen Wi of the Jhesta Tu and of Bran Dynard, trained at the Walk of Clouds.”

“But you have de sword,” the warrior said, his accent thick.

“I wield the sword of Sen Wi.”

“You be Jhesta Tu.”

Bransen shook his head, and the warrior snickered.

“You give me the sword.”

Bransen shook his head again.

“You give me the sword now, and you go.”

“And if I do not?”

“Then I take the sword from your body, yes.” As he finished, the warrior sent his nun’chu’ku into sudden motion, spinning the bottom length in a fast rotation at his side, then snapping it across his chest so that it wrapped under his upraised arm and slapped flat against his back. It came back in front of him and to his right for another spinning display before going under his upraised arm and around his back. When he brought the wooden pole humming before him once more, he set it into a furious reverse spin before him, then worked it back and up beside his right ear. He slapped his left wrist across his vertical right forearm and caught the flying pole in his grasp, immediately tugging it across back to his left while letting go with his right hand so that the other pole now flew freely.