“No,” he intoned. “I cannot let this happen.”
Selena felt Accora’s disapproving glare on her back. She was taken back to her youth, training with the weapons masters at the Temple, and being admonished when she failed to master a maneuver right away, or made a mistake that resulted in injury. The same urge to please awoke in her, just as strong and potent as it had been fifteen years earlier.
But she is no Aluren master. Discard my ampulla?
Accora nodded as if she could read her thoughts. “Or die at Bacchus’s hands.”
“She is going to die at his.” Ilior gestured with his sword at Jorqui.
Selena glanced at Julian. He had lit a cigarillo and inhaled, unhurried. “Too many distractions,” she murmured and got to her feet. “Ilior, leave off.”
“Selena…”
“Go.”
Pain shadowed his eyes for a moment before they hardened and did as commanded. He left the ring but remained in the outer bailey, watching her as Julian did.
“First, the healing,” Accora said. “Say the words, call the magic. No, put your hand down!” she snapped when Selena sought the moon. “Forget the moon. It’s there no matter how you flap and gesture at it. The healing magic is there no matter how much water you slop onto the wounded. Call the healing in the same manner as when you weave light in the midst of battle. Say the word. The word awakens the magic that lives within you. It’s already yours.”
Already mine?
The thought was hardly formed when Jorqui once again lunged at her, his sword biting at her forearm. She dodged, parried, and fell back. She tried to call the sacred word to her lips but it felt wrong, a betrayal, a blasphemy worse than taking reading of a Shaizan seer or carrying a sacred coin of Oshkat. She concentrated on keeping the native man’s blade off of her, while Accora screeched at her from the periphery.
The native came at her again and she blocked his first blow that seemed to have all the weight of a mountain behind it. He pressed her down so hard she fell to one knee, straining to prevent his broadsword from cleaving her in two. She knew she had no hope of pressing back so instead used Jorqui’s weight to her advantage. She let his sword slip and somersaulted away as he lost his balance and toppled forward. With the free moments that bought her, she reached for her ampulla.
Jorqui caught himself before he could fall, however, and he knocked the sword from her right hand and would have cleaved her shoulder had she not rolled, the ampulla tucked against her. His sword sliced her calf as she came out of her roll and blood filled her boot. She still clutched the ampulla, though the impossibility of using it was now clear. The native’s sword struck at her again and again like a snake; she had never seen a man so big move so fast. She had no weapon, only the ceramic flask she’d been given the same day she’d earned her sword, which was now lying in somewhere in the dust. Accora screamed at her to say the word, to call the healing from within. Jorqui bore down, and Selena dodged. Distantly, Ilior roared, Niven cried out, and then she went down.
Without thinking, to stave off the death in a final, defensive act, she held aloft the ampulla, like an offering to the gigantic entity that loomed over her. His sword smashed the flask to pieces. Its shards cut her hands before leaving them empty. From her periphery, Selena saw Ilior rush toward her as Jorqui raised his sword, but he would never reach her in time. Her hands still outstretched, Selena drew breath to fill them with light, to scream the sacred word, Luxari, and blind Jorqui or burn him if she had to, for it seemed he was intent on killing her no matter what Accora had said.
“Illuria!”
She gasped in shock as the word left her lips and again as an orange glow filled her hands closing her rent flesh and erasing the pain. Her heart thundered as she turned her palms in, Jorqui forgotten, and stared at the fading light and her whole flesh. Jorqui had stopped short too, but was recovering fast. Selena scrambled and called the sacred word for healing again. This time, the orange light emanated from several injuries Jorqui had opened on her flesh, and she felt an infusion of energy in her tired limbs.
“Get back!” she barked at Ilior, and the Vai’Ensai halted in his tracks. She saw the bright blue of the gem in her sword in the dirt and lunged for it. Her hand closed around the handle and came up on her feet after a graceful roll. She faced Jorqui, and with steady, strong hands, she raised her Paladin’s blade in salute.
“Let’s go.”
Jorqui nodded and lifted his blade in an imitation of her Aluren address. For the first time she noticed sweat poured off his face and blurred the artistic whorls of mud on his chest. His breath came in great bellowing gasps. But Selena knew he was far from spent. The battle began anew, but this time she led the attack, running at the big man with her blade tip before her.
He knocked it easily aside, which is what she intended. Her boot found his exposed midsection and he staggered back while she brought her sword down in a counterstroke. Her blade sliced the thick muscle of his thigh, and while she had no intent to kill, the sight of his blood flowing was satisfying to her warrior sensibility.
The cut didn’t limit him, but he hesitated and she observed that he was trained to fight but had never faced a real enemy. Sparring was not the same as battle. The wound she’d given him shocked him long enough for Selena to channel some of her healing magic into her the wound that still weakened her. The torn skin of her calf knit itself and another surge of energy suffused every fiber of her being until she felt invincible. She gave a battle cry and flew at the native man.
The battle was not easy; Jorqui’s wound didn’t slow him further and his attacks on her were frighteningly brutal. But her sword bit at him more than his did her, and when he did bleed her, she healed herself. It took practice; she needed a few moments to guide the healing to where she needed it and she almost lost an arm giving it her attentions instead of Jorqui. But she began to find the rhythm, to build the healing into her sword dance. Jorqui began to tire. Selena did not. She had a suspicion that she would be exhausted when all was said and done, but until then, she was flying. Her sword was an extension of herself. She danced with it without thought, without needing to think, admiring as if from afar, the silver fire of it in the afternoon sunlight.
At last, Jorqui, wheezing like an old man, lost his sword to Selena’s merciless attack, and he fell to his knees, arms limp, head thrown back in utter exhaustion. Selena leveled the tip of her sword to his exposed throat. Sweat poured off him like rainwater, and she could see his pulse pounding in his neck where her sword was laid.