Not Really the Prisoner of Zenda (15 page)

“There is that.”

Walter nodded. “Well, as long as you trust this Taren …”

“If I didn’t, I wouldn’t hunt with him at all, much less for orcs.” Jason frowned. “But more is better than fewer, and I’m hoping that you’re not going to try to talk Pirojil into staying on in Keranahan any longer than it takes to get the baron settled. As though that should be his problem, just because he and Erenor brought Forinel back from Therranj.”

“I dunno. You’re not going to tell me that you need one soldier that bad, are you?”

“No. But —”

“But you’re used to having him and Kethol around, and you’d rather hunt with two or three men you know and trust than with a whole company that treats the young baron as though he’s baggage, eh?”

“Well, yes.”

“I can understand that.” Walter seemed to consider it for a moment. “If you want my guess, Pirojil’s absence has a lot more to do with Leria than it does with the baron.”

“Leria and Pirojil?” Jason cocked his head to one side. “Is there something going on that I shouldn’t know about?”

“Almost certainly.” Walter smiled. “Why should today be unusual?”

Jason was suspicious. “Something between Pirojil and Leria? That doesn’t sound awfully likely. I mean, he’s, well —”

“He’s terribly ugly, yes, and that bothers him more than it bothers anybody else, I think. Women? Some. Many, maybe.” Walter tilted his head to one side. “If women were all that impressed by looks, neither of us would be able to get a date to the prom, eh?”

“Prom?”

Walter Slovotsky shook his head. “Oh, never mind. Then again, it’s a different thing — Pirojil is a soldier, and you’re royalty, and I’m, well, me. I don’t think there’s anything going on there — except maybe some unrequited passion on Pirojil’s part.”

“Which is why I shouldn’t be expecting him to hurry back to the barony?”

“Yeah. Give it some time, okay?”

Jason shrugged. Well, if it was that way …

“Now, tell me more about these orcs,” Walter Slovotsky went on. “You want to go hunting tomorrow with Taren and me?”

“The chances of me deliberately putting my tender flesh in the way of huge beasts that think of me as an appetizer are zero, zip, and none, Jason.” Slovotsky smiled. “Not unless I had to — and I sure don’t think that I have to.”

As they walked out into the bright light of the noon sun, Walter Slovotsky was keeping his eye on where the tall oaks of the forest rimmed the eastern field. “That said, of course, you never know — you were telling about these boar spears you’ve been using?”

It was all that Walter could do to keep a smile off his face as the talk turned to matters of orc hunting that interested Walter only in a distant, academic sense, as important as they were to a country baron.

Walter had been in a fight with an orc, once, and once was more than enough, and he had been entirely truthful in telling Jason that he had no intention of ever doing so again.

But he had been right in worrying that Jason would start to get itchy about Pirojil’s absence, and maybe begin to wonder why Pirojil had suddenly developed such an attachment to Forinel. That might — might — lead to some awkward questions, and Walter Slovotsky would rather awkward questions never be asked in the first place, rather than answered.

There was no reason that Jason had to know that Forinel was really Kethol, and it was always easier to keep a secret if you never knew it in the first place, and better to supply an answer to a question before it was ever asked.

Besides, Walter Slovotsky thought to himself, if you couldn’t fool your friends, who could you fool?

6

M
ORNING
AT
THE
R
ESIDENCE

I
F
YOU
CAN
manage to sleep until noon, the rest of the world will have worn itself out solving its own problems before you have to get involved.

If, that is, they don’t get worse — which is, let’s face it, the way to bet.

— Walter Slovotsky

T
he sun hadn’t fully risen over the walls when Pirojil found Miron out behind the barracks, giving a lesson in swordsmanship to a half-dozen soldiers.

The fencing circle had been cleared in the gravel in the center of a small grove of old cherry trees. Bent and crooked as only old fruit trees could be, they trembled in the wind, as though excited to watch the competition.

Like the others, Miron was stripped to the waist, barracks-style. While his broad chest held a few scars, including a long, ragged one over his heart that spoke of a serious wound and the lack of available healing draughts at the time he had gotten it, it sported none of the fresh, painful red weals that amply decorated the chests and arms of all of the soldiers, and proclaimed that Miron had been at this for a while this morning.

“A good morning to you, Captain Pirojil,” Miron said, raising the hilt of his practice sword to his head in a quick salute as he stepped back out of the circle. His boot heel crushed a fallen cherry, its juice red as fresh blood on the graveled ground.

“And to you, Lord Miron.”

Turning from him, Miron saluted his opponent, a boy of perhaps eighteen at most, who looked far too young to be a soldier.

A balding, fortyish decurion took up a position between them, his short staff outstretched.

“Make yourselves ready,” he said, raising his arm. He didn’t quite have the bored tone of a real swordmaster down, and he called out “Fight!” and snapped his arm down before stepping quite out of the cleared dirt circle that served as the practice ring.

Miron and his opponent closed.

It was possible that the boy had simply never held a sword of any sort in his hand before, or that he refused to attempt to score off a noble — Miron quickly beat the blade aside, tapped the boy lightly on the chest, retreated, then instantly reengaged and scored again, even before the decurion could step between them.

“No, no,
no
,” he said. “At least
try
to take my blade. Or, if you are too clumsy to do that, just wave your blade around as vigorously as you can, and hope to connect. Such things can happen.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Again, please.”

“Make yourself ready … and fight!”

The boy tried again, with equally useless results. Pirojil counted five, no, six marks on the boy’s chest where Miron had scored. All but one of them were directly over the heart, and the other one was just under the rib cage, on the boy’s right side. Had they been fighting with real blades, Miron’s opponent would be five times dead, and the sixth time, the boy would still be lying on the ground, clutching with white fingers at his gut, trying to hold his body’s blood in.

Interesting.

Pirojil had fenced with nobles before; generally, they tried to score on the vulnerable arms and legs. Going for the torso required getting closer to your opponent; it was a soldier’s move, not a duelist’s. In a real fight, you couldn’t count on a superficial arm or leg wound stopping an enemy, and you couldn’t afford to leave one enemy who had merely been lightly injured at your back when you turned to face another one. Or two. Or twenty. You had to put them down fast, and hope you ran out of enemies before you ran out of luck.

Of course, in a real fight, you couldn’t count on having solid-packed dirt underneath your boots, either, or be sure that if you retreated out of the range of a lunge, you wouldn’t stumble over something, and find yourself quickly spitted on a sword. Or a spear. Or get kicked in the head or the balls. Or …

“Care to join us?” Miron pointed his button-tipped practice sword at the ground in front of him. “Since the Residence seems to be lacking a master of swords at the moment, I thought I’d give a few lessons.”

“Certainly,” Pirojil said. “I’m always eager to learn from my betters.”

Miron just smiled. “Then let us have at it — the day gets no younger, and neither do you.”

Pirojil unbuckled his sword belt, shed his tunic, and picked up one of the practice swords. It was too light, more reminiscent of a dueling sword than of a soldier’s saber.

Pirojil felt at the button tip. It was solid, properly welded on, not merely capped. Thin and narrow, the unsharpened blade flexed properly, showing no signs of breaking, although he wouldn’t have wanted to try to bend it much farther. It was much more elegant than the wooden practice swords that Pirojil had trained with.

He tossed it underhand to Miron, who snatched it out of the air, raising an eyebrow in surprise.

“I’d prefer to use your practice blade, Lord Miron — if you don’t mind.”

He had to admire how quickly Miron adapted — Miron simply tossed Pirojil his own practice sword, and gave a casual shrug. “As you wish.”

This blade flexed just as well as the other one had, but even Pirojil’s blunt fingers could easily detect that the button was loose. It would be a matter of a solid tug to remove it, instantly turning what was supposedly simply a practice weapon into something deadly.

Pirojil didn’t say anything about that, or about anything else.

“Make yourselves ready …”

Pirojil raised the sword in a quick salute, and at Miron’s returning salute, Pirojil dropped into a fighting stance, advancing immediately when the decurion called out, “Fight!”

They touched swords, and then Miron dropped his point and tried a tentative lunge, cutting over Pirojil’s sword and trying for a high-line thrust when Pirojil easily parried. He would have easily scored a point on Pirojil’s forearm if Pirojil hadn’t stepped back.

Pirojil reengaged, extended his arm to offer it as a target, and whipped the side of his blade at Miron’s sword arm when Miron lunged.

It connected with a satisfying
smack
. If Pirojil had been using his real sword, it would have cut Miron’s arm to the bone.

“Your point,” Miron said, smiling. The red weal flared brightly on his arm, but if Miron was in any discomfort, he didn’t let it show.

“Another?” Pirojil asked.

Miron’s eyes were still on the tip of Pirojil’s sword. The button was still in place. “If you please.”

“Make yourself ready … and fight!”

This time, Miron’s attack was more tentative. His weight on the balls of his feet, he danced in and out of the live zone, quickly parrying Pirojil’s equally tentative attacks before retreating out of range. But Pirojil pressed forward, and Miron retreated, stopping only when the heel of his back foot touched the gravel surrounding the fencing circle.

Miron started to lower his blade in surrender, but before he could complete the move, Pirojil lunged in, the tip of the practice sword catching Miron on the face. The covered point skidded along Miron’s cheek before he could raise his own sword to parry.

“Halt,” the decurion called out, stepping between the two of them, his short staff ready to deflect a blow, be it reflexive or intentional.

Pirojil stepped back and lowered his sword.

“Very nice,” Miron said, wiping the back of his free hand against his cheek. “You are rather better at this than I would have thought.”

“Another, please?”

“Of course.”

“Make yourself ready … and fight!”

Pirojil raised the sword over his head and played with the tip, then advanced, his left side toward Miron, his right arm and the sword behind him.

Miron hadn’t fooled him for a moment, letting Pirojil win two points. But keep the point out of view for a moment, then move the sword back and forth too quickly for Miron to be able to see the tip clearly, and Miron would have good reason to worry that Pirojil had removed the practice tip from the sword, and consider the thought of his own flesh being pierced, and perhaps Pirojil could see just how good this Miron was.

Miron’s eyes widened fractionally, and when Pirojil whipped the sword around as he advanced, he wasn’t all surprised that Miron easily parried his slashing attack.

Their blades moved faster than any eye could follow, including Pirojil’s.

A real fight was different, but in a fencing circle Pirojil always had a detached feeling, as though he were outside his body, watching what was going on, realizing only in retrospect what he had been thinking, what he had been doing.

That was the way of it. You practiced, as much as you could, working through combinations of attacks and parries and counters at first slowly, then faster and faster, until you knew the moves in your balls and bones, not in your mind, because when it was real — even as marginally real as a practice bout was — your mind was never fast enough, and never would be, never could be.

Miron would, of course, try for a touch on Pirojil’s arm, or leg, to win the point, from as great a distance as possible, and —

Miron feinted and lunged low through Pirojil’s defenses as though they simply weren’t there, and the tip of his blade caught Pirojil just below the sternum.

Pirojil’s breath went out of him with a whoosh, and his traitor knees turned all liquid and useless. Pirojil tried to bring his blade up to protect himself from a continued attack, but his arms wouldn’t work, either. Unable to protect himself, he fell to the ground, the left side of his face pressed into the dirt. He wanted, as much as he had ever wanted anything, to pull breath into his lungs, not caring a whit if it brought dirt and dust along with it.

But he couldn’t. All he could do was lie there and make choking sounds, and try to breathe.

“Quickly,” Miron said, “bring over the healing draughts — and get him up. Quickly, now, quickly.”

Strong hands brought Pirojil up to his knees, and the cold lip of the brass bottle was pressed to his lips, grinding the sand and the grit into his teeth.

He pushed it away, embarrassed at how difficult it was. There was no point in wasting expensive healing draughts on something this minor, no matter how much it hurt.

“He won’t —”

“Well, then, leave him be,” Miron said. “If he doesn’t want it, he doesn’t have to have it.”

Two of the soldiers helped him to his feet, and held him up straight until his breath returned in ragged little gasps.