Amara whirled and crouched and whirled again, her blade whipping at Aldrick’s throat, knees, and throat again. The swordsman blocked each strike and then with a sudden, hard smile, his blade lashed out. Amara hissed, and the sword tumbled from her hands, falling to the stones near Tavi.
Aldrick whipped his blade in a horizontal line, and Amara let out a harsh cry, staggering against the battlements, her hair fallen around her face. Tavi could see blood on the mail around her belly. Amara turned toward Aldrick, unsteady on her feet and swung her arm at him in a strike. The swordsman slapped her hand aside, and his foot lashed out at her knee. Amara gasped and fell to the stone. She struggled to rise again.
Aldrick shook his head, as though disgusted, and slammed one heavy boot down onto Amara’s splinted arm. She let out a cry and jerked. She looked up at Tavi, her eyes not focused, her face bedsheet-white.
Aldrick did not pause. He drew back his blade, crouching, and with two hands swung it toward the paralyzed Cursor.
Tavi didn’t stop to think. He seized the fallen sword in his left hand and lunged forward from his knees, toward the swordsman. The guardsman’s blade flicked out and found the gap between the swordsman’s mail and the tops of his boots, drawing an insignificant cut across the skin. But it was enough to make Aldrick divert the blow aimed for Amara’s neck, to parry Tavi’s clumsy thrust aside.
Aldrick snarled, his face suddenly suffused with scarlet anger, making an old scar stand out white against his cheek. He slammed his weapon against Tavi’s. Tavi felt the jolt of it in his shoulders and chest, and his arm went numb in a tinglingwash of sensation, from fingertip to elbow. The sword flew off somewhere behind him.
He rolled back and tried to lift the shield to cover himself, but the swordsman kicked it aside, and it tumbled out of Tavi’s grasp and into the courtyard below.
“Stupid boy,” Aldrick said, eyes cold. “Give me the dagger.”
Tavi clutched his hand on the dagger’s hilt and started worming his way back along the wall. “You killed him,” Tavi shouted, his voice hoarse. “You killed my uncle!”
“And what happened to my Odiana is your fault. I should kill you right here,” Aldrick growled. “Give up. You can’t win.”
“Go to the crows! If I don’t beat you, someone else will!”
“Have it your way,” the swordsman said. He whirled the sword in his fingers and closed toward Tavi, lifting the blade, eyes cold. “If Araris Valerian himself was here, he couldn’t beat me. And you aren’t Araris.”
The swordsman brought both hands to the hilt of the sword and struck, Tavi saw the cold, bloodied metal of the blade falling toward him and knew that he was about to die. He screamed and lifted a hand, knowing full well that it would do him no good, but he was unable to do anything else.
The sword came down in the death stroke.
And met steel in a cold, clear chime, like a bell. A cloud of silver sparks rained down where Aldrick’s blade had met the steel of the guardsman’s sword.
Fade stood over Tavi, both hands on the hilt of the short blade, his legs spread out wide, knees bent, his body relaxed. The swordsman bore down on his weapon, but Fade seemed able to hold it away from Tavi with little effort, and after a scant pair of heartbeats, Fade twisted his body. Aldrick’s blade slid to one side, and he skipped back from a counterstroke— but not fast enough. Fade’s sword whipped toward Aldrick’s face, and split the white scar there open anew, blood flowing.
Aldrick dropped back into a guard position, watching Fade, his eyes wide, his reddened face going pale. “No,” he said. “No.”
Fade took a step forward and stood between Tavi and the other two men on the wall. His voice came out quiet, low, steady. “Stay behind me, Tavi.”
Tavi stared in shock. He clutched the dagger and scooted back from the two men.
“You aren’t,” Aldrick snarled. “You can’t be. You’re dead.”
Fade said, “You talk too much.”
Then he spun forward, deftly stepping over Amara’s unmoving form, his sword gliding toward the swordsman. Aldrick parried in a shower of scarlet sparks, slid a thrust to his belly aside, and cut at the slave’s head. Fade dropped to a crouch, and the blow struck cleanly through two feet of furycrafted battlement stone. A chunk of stone the size of a big washtub slid down the wall and fell into the battle outside the fortress.
Fade rose, blade dancing, and pressed the swordsman back, down the battlements, his ragged and unkempt hair flying about his head, his scarred face set in an expression of cool detachment. When his sword struck Aldrick’s, scarlet fire rained down, and when he caught one of the swordsman’s strikes, clouds of silver-white motes flew forth in a flash.
Tavi saw Aldrick begin to panic, his movements becoming jerkier, faster, less elegant. He retreated step by step, and Fade pressed him relentlessly. The slave swept one blow at Aldrick that missed altogether, throwing up another shower of sparks as the blade cut through the stone near Aldrick’s feet, but the slave seemed to recover rapidly, and he began to push Aldrick down the wall once again.
Tavi had never seen anything so graceful, so terrifying, as the two men clashing together. Though Aldrick was the larger of the pair, Fade seemed more nimble, his movements more fluid, again and again blocking blows that might have killed him to miss by the barest margin. He leapt over one strike, ducked under another, and thrust at Aldrick’s belly once more. The swordsman parried him aside, spinning on his feet to reverse positions with Fade on the narrow battlements, so that he now stood with his back to Tavi.
Aldrick rained a pair of heavy blows down on Fade, who danced aside from one and slid the other off the guardsman’s blade. Fade countered with a volley of cuts and thrusts too swift for Tavi to follow, and Aldrick once again backed down the wall, defending himself.
Fade’s blade whipped at Aldrick’s foot and missed, slashing stone. Aldrick kicked the slave in the face with one heavy boot, and Fade’s face snapped to one side. He turned the motion into an upward slash, but that blow too missed Aldrick altogether, instead slashing through the massive merlon beside him.
Aldrick’s sword darted down to Fade’s wrist, a swift cut that drew blood and threw the sword from the slave’s hands and down into the courtyard below. Fade cried out and fell to his knees, clutching the hand to his chest.
Aldrick stood over Fade, panting, white around the eyes, and drew his sword slowly up behind him. “Over,” he said. “Finally over. You lose.”
Fade said, “Look where you’re standing.”
Tavi looked down at Aldrick’s feet, at the deep slashes in the battlements where Fade’s sword had cut through the stone.
Aldrick looked down, and his face went white.