Wings Over Talera - Charles Allen Gramlich [23]
I heard Diken Graye rise from his cot behind us but did not turn my gaze from Kuurus. Rannon’s younger brother was slighter than I, less than six feet tall and probably weighing no more than a hundred and eighty pounds. His hair hung longer than mine—past the shoulders in artificial curls—and was as glossy dark as his sister’s. His eyes were blue in a handsome face. There were those who called him “pretty,” though not where he could hear.
Seldom had Kuurus and I spoken. I did not think he liked me much, though I did not know why. Now he smirked with a curve of lips that were almost too generous to be those of a human male.
“Amazing,” he said. “My father is such a brilliant man but he did not think to look for you here. And my sister.... Well, my sister is blinded. ’Tis fortunate that I am not so easily beguiled.”
“Aye,” I said, smiling.
Kuurus frowned, wondering, perhaps, why I did not look afraid or angry, why I smiled. I did so because his words had told me much of interest, not least of which was that only he and his twelve men knew where we were.
I glanced at Kreeg. His sword was held in his left hand; in the right he idly spun the ironwood stave. My own blade twitched in my fist and I took a step forward and spread my arms.
“Kill me, Kuurus,” I said. “That’s the only way you’ll stop me.” I started walking toward him.
Muscles went tight in the arms of Kuurus’s men. Fingers quivered suddenly on crossbow triggers. Pupils dilated. Then Kuurus was shouting at his guards not to fire. He knew, as I knew, that it was not quite yet acceptable to shoot me down like a dog or a wurstid. He wanted to capture me. He needed to capture me.
“Free me!” Diken Graye was shouting from behind his bars. I had no time.
There came the putting away of crossbows, the drawing of swords. At dungeon’s heart would stand thirteen men against two. But the thirteen could not come at the two all at once. Kreeg took the left side of the room, I the right. The ex-slave kept the table between himself and the guards; I stalked forward openly.
The attack came. I kicked a chair into two of my foes, sent them down in a tangle, followed that with a blazing lunge that cut a man to the bone of his shoulder. His sword clattered to the floor as he fell back. The stench of blood shocked the room.
I heard Kreeg’s staff crack on flesh, heard an aborted scream. Then the mad heat took me. The anger had roiled in my belly ever since the word treason had been mentioned beside my name. I released it now.
A sword stabbed toward me. I slapped it aside with a bare hand against the flat of it, slashed my own blade down across the man’s face. He vented a shriek that spumed with crimson. I ducked another sword, spun and lashed out with a foot. Nyshphalians have never invented spurs but the heels of their boots are often adorned with spiked buckles that serve much the same purpose. My buckles acted as weapons now as my swinging leg ripped one man’s feet from under him in a spray of wet red. I came around with my sword whickering out to cut another man across the wrist, sending his weapon flying, making him back away in fear.
Kreeg wielded a vicious cudgel, keeping his short-sword as a defense and backup. He’d put two foes out of the fight, was engaged with two more. Others were blocked by the oaken dining board. One man jumped on top of the table near me, hoping to leap down behind us. I kicked the table’s claw-footed leg, jarred the man into a fall. He landed on hands and knees and I hammered him to blackness with the hilt of my sword.
Six of Kuurus’s men were out of the fight, in the space of moments, and neither Kreeg nor I had been touched. We’d killed none of them, for they were Rannon’s people and I still loved her, but they were no good to their prince