In this instance, however, the next strike took dead aim at his naked wrist. Rather than shy from the advancing blow, Kylac rolled forward underneath it, trading a small cut on the shoulder of his jerkin for his pursuit of Xarius’s retreating blade. His open hand grabbed for its hilt as his remaining sword stabbed hard against a nerve in Xarius’s elbow, disabling his grip.
An overhead block spared Kylac’s head a cleaving, and enabled him to spring up with confiscated steel in hand. By the time Brie had placed a hand to her mouth to silence her squeak of alarm at Kylac’s seeming vulnerability, it was he who held the edge of a sharp blade against his opponent’s throat, drawing Xarius backward into a submissive stance.
They remained locked that way for a moment, Kylac triumphant, Xarius fuming, neither making a sound. It was Rohn who finally shattered the stillness.
“I heard no one yield.”
Kylac glanced at his father, then peered down into Xarius’s livid face. In nine years of training together, not once had the elder fighter admitted defeat. He didn’t have to. Both knew that Kylac wasn’t going to slit his throat. Even if Kylac couldn’t guarantee the same were their positions reversed.
Rohn, too, had seen this stalemate before, and shook his head disapprovingly. “Suffer the weak…” He left the sentence hanging, waiting for Kylac to complete it.
“And you will suffer their weakness.”
“Again you prove soft—a softness with which you would now infect others.” Rohn gestured vaguely toward Brie. “You think you’ve defended her this day? Shielded her with your coddling? You’ve enabled a deficiency. Reinforced a flaw. Fostered a failing. You have killed her, perhaps, and do not yet know it.”
Kylac didn’t dare face Brie, as he wished. Instead, he glanced down at Xarius, who now wore a derisive sneer.
“We do not teach failure here,” his father spat, and swept the arena with his glare. “This lesson is over.”
When her work was finished, Kylac escorted Brie home as he often did, although they had crossed two plazas and the bridge on Wayfarer before he dared speak to her.
“Are you all right?”
“Are you?” she snapped.
Evidently, he had loosed his tongue too soon. “I never meant…I only thought—”
“I know what you thought, Kylac.”
“Will you not permit my apology? My father—”
“Your father was right. I don’t need to be coddled. He thinks me weak as is.”
Kylac blinked. She was taking Rohn’s part? He felt a stirring of indignation. “Would you have had me stand aside? Leave you to Xarius?”
“It never should have come to that. You should have obeyed your father and delivered whatever punishment I was to receive. I’ve no fear of bruises. Especially if Master Rohn deems them necessary.”
Her assessment stung. It had been foolish of him to tempt her as he had, to goad her into breaking the rules and violating his father’s trust. For that, her anger was well warranted. But to be wroth with him for accepting blame, and for shielding her…what sense did that make?
Rather than argue, he opted for the safety of silence, stewing privately. Next time, she could fend for herself, if so determined. Let the blood she mopped from the arena floor be her own.
Mayhap he wasn’t so soft as his father feared.
They slipped through the south gates of the Blackthorn district to enter Crestmire—or the Mire, as it was more commonly known. Stone walls, paved streets, and lush gardens quickly gave way to thin wood slats, dirt lanes, and weedy plots littered with filth and refuse. Homeless beggars skulked amid the shadows, muttering to themselves or to the rats who served audience. Brusque shouts and rough laughter echoed from the taverns and brothels that dominated the area. Smith Jarrons was being called a cheat again by some angry patron, while stablemaster Paresh was berating one of his grooms.
Brie’s petulant silence aside, it seemed all was in order here.
They passed a butcher’s shop, a cobbler’s shack, and a derelict chandlery that had near burned to the ground more than a year past when the proprietor, it was said, had fallen into a drunken sleep with a lit pipe in his mouth. The ground on which it stood edged a slough that stank of sewage, and so the structure sat, half-collapsed, home now to mice and insects and a handful of feral cats. Kylac spotted one of the latter, a striped tom, eyeing him from a blackened eave.
Beyond that, as they continued to round the slough, lay a cluster of dilapidated homes, lit from within by guttering oil lamps and evening cookfires. Aback of these farther still, tucked in amid a swath of decaying brambles, stood a lone, tumbledown cottage that might have been deserted for all the light that burned in its empty windows. Someday soon, it would be, if gods there were—though Kylac had his doubts.
Brie slowed as they neared its sagging porch, halting when they were yet a stone’s throw away. A foul breeze blowing in over the slough seemed to cool her anger.