One of the new men, who carried what looked like a fish knife, came unsteadily forward to get a closer look at Indra and her companion. He let out a sonorous belch. “This?” he said, waving his knife hand in their direction. “This is who beat you up and robbed you? An old man and a little girl?” The others snickered drunkenly. Only the original three remained unamused.
“I told you! They jumped us while we were sleeping!” the tall one insisted, trying to stave off the embarrassment. “And right there’s the iron they took from us!” He pointed to the base of the oak tree where the chain Indra had been so curious about sat in a misshapen spool. “An even split when we sell it, like I said.”
“I can see why you’d need to come mob-handed to get it back,” said Fish Knife, not yet satisfied that he’d had his fun. “A formidable pair, these two. Just look at ’em! Was it the young girl broke your arm, Pick? I imagine the stink from the old beggar felled the other two of you.”
Now the other newcomers were laughing raucously, which only enraged the tall man further. As they bickered among themselves, Indra took a backward step, closer to Wulfric.
“Can you fight?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“But I will not.”
She glanced at him. “What?”
“Long ago,” he said, “I took a vow to never again do violence against another.”
“How lovely for you. You do understand that these men mean us harm?”
“Yes. You should run.”
“And you?”
He gave no answer; simply stood there. Indra shook her head, exasperated. So he was a madman after all, just another vagrant without the sense to care even for his own life. And she was going to have to do this all herself. Run? The very thought made the anger start to rise up from the pit of her stomach like bile. She had never run from danger; she had spent her entire life running toward it.
She looked down and saw her staff where she had laid it to rest in the grass. She hooked the toe of her boot under it and with a flick of her foot brought it up to meet her hand. The band of ten appeared to have settled their differences, and the tall one turned away from the others and back toward Indra, standing before him, defiant. She raised her voice, loud enough to address them all.
“For whatever it’s worth, this man is lying to you,” she said, gesturing with her staff at the tall man. “We never robbed him—the chain was never his. You’ve been brought here under false pretenses. You’d do best to turn around and go back to town.”
“Or what?” growled Fish Knife. As Indra suspected, there would be no way to talk these men down. The more she tried to reason with them, the more riled up they would get. Better to just get the thing over with.
“Or I’ll show you how these three morons really got hurt.”
Two steps behind her, Wulfric again found himself deeply conflicted. Never once had he broken his oath, an oath taken long ago and forged by the fire of his will over the past fifteen years: though he could not always protect others from the violence done by the beast within him, he would at least ensure that as a human he never harmed another, not even to defend himself. The beatings he sometimes took as a consequence were part of his penance. But his years of isolation had forestalled the question—was he prepared to stand by and let violence be done to another? An innocent endangered only because she had come to his aid?
Another problem, more practical, also now occurred to him. The chain. They were not so far from town yet, and there were now
more than enough of these ruffians to carry it. He could not lose it now, not this close to dark. Many more than just these ten would die if he did.
And the girl.
There were precious few like her left in the world, who would risk their own life to save that of a stranger. His conscience would not allow so rare a soul to be snuffed out by these, the worst of men. He had come to think of all forms of violence as evil, but the greater evil would be to stand idly by and allow darkness to swallow up this small, bright point of light.
Indra sensed movement behind her and glanced over to see Wulfric now standing at her side, his gaze intent on the men confronting them.
“Give me a sword,” he said.
“I thought you didn’t fight.”
“Would you prefer to face them alone?”
Indra thought for a moment. Perhaps now wasn’t the best time to question his sudden change of heart. She shifted at the waist, turning to offer him his choice of the two swords sheathed across her back. He hesitated for a moment, then reached up, almost gingerly, and pulled one free.
Wulfric flexed his fingers tight around the hilt. He could tell by the sword’s weight and balance that it was quality, not the weapon of an amateur. It felt light to him; it had likely been custom-made for the girl, who was smaller and more agile than he. But though it was not a sword he would have chosen for himself, it felt familiar in his hand, so much so that it unsettled him. This was the first time in more than fifteen years that he had held any form of weapon, and yet the sword felt like an extension of an arm that had only been numb a while and had now regained full feeling. He hated how natural it felt.
The ten men looked at him, amused. The sight of this filthy, disheveled old man wielding a sword was ludicrous. He looked like he was fearful he might cut himself.
“Hold up,” said Fish Knife, grinning and mockingly waving the others back. “The old fella wants a piece of us now as well.”
Wulfric raised the sword and pointed it at the men. “Leave here,” he said. “Or die here.”
He did not bellow it, barely raised his voice at all. Just enough to be heard clearly and no misunderstanding. But something in his tone gave each man pause. They might actually have thought twice and walked away but for Fish Knife, who was too drunk and riled to be deterred, and who now ran headlong at Indra with his dull little blade.
Indra spun and caught him hard on the side of his face with her staff and he went down, rolling in the grass and clutching his cheek. The sight of the fallen man spurred the others to charge in, all at once. Indra and Wulfric stepped away from one another to each give the other room and went to work.
The one with the blackjacks was the first to die. Wulfric brought his sword up and caught him across the neck with the tip of the blade, opening up his throat. As his body fell away, two more men came at Wulfric. One was met with an elbow to the jaw that shattered it and knocked out most of his front teeth; the other took a wild swing at Wulfric with a gnarled club. Wulfric ducked and thrust his sword upward, beneath the man’s extended arm and deep into his armpit, until its point burst through the far side of the man’s neck. The man made a quiet gurgling sound, then fell limply to the ground as Wulfric withdrew the sword.
Indra had felled two men with her staff and was parrying a flurry of wild attacks from a third. She was a half step slower than usual, having positioned herself to watch Wulfric from the corner of her eye as she fought.
It was astonishing. Not so much that he could in fact defend himself—although that was surprise enough—but more the brutal efficiency of it. The first man had gone down so fast that at first Indra had thought he tripped, only noticing that his throat was
slit wide open when he hit the ground. She had never even seen Wulfric’s deft flourish of the sword.
The second had died in no manner that she had ever seen: a lethal riposte that should not have been possible from that position. And he was as merciless as he was skilled. Indra had spent years learning how to defend herself without killing, using lethal force only when necessary, but this man apparently knew no other way. For a man who just moments ago had proclaimed a vow of peace, he—
Nnff
. Indra felt a sudden pain in her ribs. Momentarily distracted, she had allowed the man she was fighting to land a blow, which took the breath out of her and sent her reeling backward. Another man seized on the opening and came at her, and this one was more skilled than he looked, jabbing and thrusting with a thin needle-like knife, vicious and fast. She parried, but with the first man still coming at her with his club, it was all she could do to keep them both at bay. She could no longer afford to fight by half measures. If she wanted to stay alive, she had to let her anger in.
She let loose a roar and drew her sword. As the man with the knife swiped at her, she dodged and took his hand off with one clean blow. He cried out and stumbled toward her, blood pouring from his wrist, and she thrust her sword forward, deep into his gut. As she ran him through, the man with the club came at her with a crude overhead swing. It would have been easy to glance aside, but that the man with her sword through him was clutching her wrist with his one remaining hand, still alive, still screaming. She could not pull the sword free.
Straining, Indra swung around to put him between her and her other attacker, so that as the club came down it struck the skewered man sharply across the head. Mercifully, he stopped screaming and released her wrist. As soon as his body slackened and slipped free of her blade, Indra lunged at the other man, piercing him just above the groin. He shrieked, then toppled face-first to the ground, writhing, as she withdrew.
Wulfric was fighting with another man now, a big man who seemed to be pressing him, at least for the moment. Indra was about to go to his aid when she felt something hit her hard in the chest. The ground left her feet and suddenly she was on her back, a man with a bloody, toothless mouth and a horribly crooked jaw on top of her, pounding her with his fists. He managed to bloody her nose before she could raise her sword up and jam it against the underside of his unhinged jaw. She drove upward with both hands and heard a crunch when it would go no farther. The man’s eyes rolled back and he went limp and slumped forward onto her.
She rolled him off hastily and clambered back to her feet, pulling the sword free and looking up in time to see Wulfric split the head of the man he was fighting into two pieces. Three men dead at his feet now, with yet another man coming at him, flailing this way and that with some kind of crude mace.
One of the men Indra had knocked down was clutching at her thigh, trying to pull himself up or her down. She bashed the pommel of her sword against his head and he went back down, quiet again. Then she felt something cold and sharp against the back of her head and suddenly the world was spinning away from her. She stumbled, dizzy, and the ground rose up to meet her.
She felt herself hit the ground, and for a moment it was almost peaceful there, with the cold wet grass against her cheek. Then she was pulled up from behind, with arms hooked around her elbows to keep them pinned behind her back. When she was hauled to her feet, there was the tall man, with a malevolent grin, a bloodstained hunk of rock held in his one good fist. He dropped it and bent over to pick up Indra’s sword instead. She had lost it when she hit the ground, and now he had it, the pig.
This pig had her sword.
She was still dazed, her vision blurry, and separated enough from her senses that her anger now had free rein. Otherwise she would surely have known better than to spit in the face of a man who held a sword against her while she was pinned. But that is
what she did, her thick gob of phlegm hitting the tall man between his nose and his top lip. He stood there for a moment, frozen in disbelief, and in her delirium, Indra laughed.
Her laughter brought back the tall man’s anger, and he wiped the spit away with his forearm, then brought the tip of her own sword up to her throat.
Indra thrust her head back sharply and caught the man who was holding her from behind square in the nose. Fish Knife released her and stumbled backward, clutching his face. Free to stand on her own, Indra realized how unsteady on her feet she still was. Drunkenly, she made a grab for her sword, and as she and the tall man struggled, she saw Wulfric kill the man he had been fighting.
As the body in front of him collapsed to the ground, Wulfric looked over to see Indra in trouble, wrestling with the tall man for control of her sword. He did not see the man that Indra had knocked to the ground during the first throes of the melee, the one with the chipped sword, getting to his feet. Indra saw it, saw the man coming up behind Wulfric and drawing back his blade to strike. She opened her mouth to call out a warning and realized that she still did not know his name, this strange man who knew too much about the Order, who claimed to have renounced violence, and who then killed four men with more brutality and skill than she had ever seen.
Time seemed to slow and sound to fall away into silence. Indra heard herself call out, “Behind you!” and saw Wulfric turn, but too late. The man with the sword swung it hard and well and caught Wulfric exactly where he had aimed, at the base of his neck. Wulfric’s head separated cleanly from his body as the blade passed through, blood pulsing from his stump of a neck. Indra screamed but heard nothing, her world now a silent nightmare. Wulfric’s headless body seemed to take a faltering half step forward before slumping to its knees and toppling to the ground a few feet from where his head had come to rest.
Indra looked down in horror as Wulfric’s body twitched once, then again, and was still. Her stomach rolled over, sickened. Then she felt another sharp blow to the back of her head, and this time the world went away completely.
Indra did not know how long she had been unconscious, only that it was darker than before when she groggily came around. The day’s light had waned to its last ebbs, soon to give way to the onset of night.
She blinked, trying to clear her blurred vision, and looked around. She was still in the clearing, not far from where she had fallen. Her arms and shoulders ached, and the back of her head stung where she had been twice struck. She could feel that some of her hair was stuck to the side of her face, matted with her own dried blood. She tried to reach up and brush it away, only to realize why her shoulders ached. Her arms were pulled behind her and bound at the wrists. She looked around, as much as her limited movement would allow, and saw that she was seated on the ground at the base of a tree, and secured fast to it by a rope that wrapped around her torso. Whoever had done the tying had done it well; try as she might, she could barely move. She tried to get her feet under her, push herself up so that at least she would be standing, but even that was beyond her. She slumped back down, frustrated.