From the case she removed two rapiers of equal length and size and handed one to him. His palm grasped the handle inside the intricate silver hand guard, a feature meant to protect his hand from an opponent’s blade.
“I’m suddenly wishing I’d taken up fencing back in England,” he said, the leather-wrapped handle slipping around inside his sweaty palm.
“These are dull, and only for practice. You will require a sharpened sword to pierce a gargoyle’s scales,” Chelle said.
Grayson tried to catch her eye to see if the words she’d just uttered had bothered her at all. They had bothered him. He couldn’t imagine using any weapon to pierce a gargoyle’s scales.
For he and Chelle to go out on their own and kill gargoyles bordered on insane. It wasn’t that Grayson didn’t want revenge for what those Chimeras had done—they’d taken Léon’s life and the lives of other Dusters. But Chelle’s passion for this plan, her insistence that it happen, still felt unsubstantiated. It seemed to Grayson that she must have had more than just one reason to put it into action.
Chelle stepped away and rolled her wrist, cutting her rapier through the air at angles. Grayson removed his jacket, shifting his rapier from one hand to the other before tossing the jacket to the dusty floor.
“Are you truly ready to kill a gargoyle in cold blood?” he asked.
She used his distraction to cut her blade up through the air and lunge toward him. He swung his rapier like a cricket bat and knocked the oncoming blade aside.
“Yes,” she answered. The lack of hesitation or doubt unsettled him.
“If you really think killing them is the way to solve the problem, what makes us any better than the Chimeras?” he asked.
Chelle hardened her gaze at being likened to the Dispossessed.
“The gargoyles don’t care about stopping Axia. They are doing this to prove their power and strength.” She swung her blade again, this time in a downward, diagonal slice.
Grayson clashed his blade into hers and held it level.
“They are doing it because they will take any opportunity of unrest to lash out at humans,” Chelle continued, her teeth gritted with the effort of throwing off the pressure of Grayson’s rapier.
He loosened the tension in his arm and their blades swung toward the floor. Chelle breathed heavily, her nostrils flaring, and not just from physical exertion. His accusing the Alliance of being no better than the ruthless Chimeras had upset her more than he’d intended.
“What is it?” he asked, surprising her with a lunge and thrust of his own. Chelle intercepted the point of his blade, but not before it came dangerously close to her throat. “Why do you despise the Dispossessed the way you do?”
She’d never tried to hide how she felt about the gargoyles. She didn’t trust them, and was definitely in favor of the proposed regulations to put the Dispossessed on shorter leashes.
The fire in Chelle’s expression sputtered, and though it was only for a moment, Grayson thought he saw a touch of sad vulnerability. She glazed it back over with indignation before knocking Grayson’s blade aside. She moved swiftly, the point of her rapier now nudging his pectorals.
“Something happened,” he wagered, knowing full well Chelle might nick him for it.
She didn’t. Instead, she let the tip glide down the front of his waistcoat. The distant sadness came back.
“My father was a hunter. One of the best,” she said, her voice no longer gruff or defensive. The changing light of the two lanterns cast fingers of shadows across her face. “He was on patrol in the Marais one night when a gargoyle … it just attacked. No warning. No reason. The gargoyle’s talons ripped through his arms, shearing muscle and breaking bone.”
Chelle squeezed her eyes shut against the unbearable drain of memories. Grayson knew what it felt like to remember awful things and experience them again and again.
“There was too much damage. Even after he’d healed he wasn’t able to hold a sword without it trembling and then clattering to the ground. His hands just couldn’t stay closed around the handle. After that, they stuck him in the weapons room. His new duty was to polish and sharpen the blades he’d once wielded with such grace and skill.”
Grayson watched as Chelle’s face, screwed up like a prune, began to soften.
“What happened to him?” he asked.
Eyes still closed, Chelle swiped at a tear before Grayson could see it fall past her lashes.
“What do you think happened to him?” she bit off, the return of her defensive style oddly comforting.
Chelle’s father was dead. If he had been alive, he would have still been in the weapons room at H?tel Bastian polishing silver. How he’d died wasn’t much of a mystery, either.
“And the gargoyle? What was done about him?” Grayson asked.
Chelle, though diminutive in height and weight, seemed to grow larger with the return of her anger.