Pink light slanted through the south-facing balistrariae, across the chaos her search had created. Dawn. She wouldn’t hear voices in the street until the door opened; the walls of the Arsenal were too thick. Once the door opened, that was her chance to slip out of the archives without setting off any bells.
So what, exactly, would she take with her?
And what did she plan on leaving behind?
Chapter 13
“W
e will use the Renaissance
code duello,
” announced Dillon Charles, and gave Trace an over-exaggerated look of sympathy. “That means the dueling code.”
“Ya think?” Trace wondered how badly it would break the
code duello
to just KO the jerk and be done with it. But Mitch and Smith had given him a refresher course on the rules, just in case. Apparently, an honorable second was not above killing his own man if that man cheated.
True, his friends’ honor had already been compromised. But why risk it?
“Yes,” agreed Dillon, pacing across the glossy, dark wood floor. “I see you brought both your seconds. As you can see, I have mine. And David, over there, is a doctor.”
David held up a hand briefly.
“As agreed yestereve—” yeah, he actually said
yestereve
“—we’re too civilized to go for either first blood or duels to the death, tempting or not. So we’re fighting to ten touches, yes?”
Smith agreed while Trace glanced toward the stone stairway, wishing he knew if Sibyl had found what she needed. Whether she had or not, she needed him to use this duel to stall, so that she could sneak back out to safety. So as much as he wanted to just get to the slashing-stabbing-violence part of the morning, he merely shifted his weight and let Dillon blather on.
This was him stalling.
“Most duels are to start with a final attempt at reconciliation,” continued Dillon, as if this was some college class instead of a freakin’ fight. “You challenged me, though I’m the injured party.”
Trace let his scowl refute that part.
“You took something, which doesn’t belong to you.” Dillon looked coolly at the sword case. “Speaking of which…?”
Mitch opened the aluminum case to reveal, on egg carton-shell foam lining, the ancient blade. No way were either of them fighting without the proof that their prize, the sword, waited for the victor.
“Unless my dad was screwing around with your mom and we’re half brothers,” noted Trace, “it belongs to me.”
He enjoyed Dillon’s obvious distaste at the idea.
“No reconciliation, then.” Dillon set his mouth in that most annoying way of his. “Good. We’ve taken the liberty of pacing off the piste—that would be the fighting area, Beaudry—although we marked the corners with painter’s tape instead of handkerchiefs. More practical, don’t you think? Anybody who steps out of bounds is deemed a coward and, of course, receives a penalty.”
Trace folded his arms. “Can I hurt you now?”
“Stop it,” snapped Smith—who’d luckily warned Trace that he’d be playing the sympathetic-to-Dillon role for their morning’s entertainment.
Good cop,
without the legal overtones. “These rituals may not matter to
you—
”
“It’s quite all right,” Dillon assured him. “I knew what to expect from this one already. Luckily, size and bluster tends to be a weakness in fencing, not a strength. Morgan?”
One of his seconds—a silver spoon type who somehow fit his girly name—knelt and opened three long, wooden boxes. In each lay a pair of fencing sabers.
“As we brought the weapons, you may choose which you prefer.”
Nice of him. While Trace preferred the weight of a saber over the wimpier épée or foil, sabers boasted curved hand guards that sometimes cramped his large hands. He tried one, then another and nodded when he found one that he could grip comfortably.
It would be easier to accept Dillon’s brand of honor, though, if Trace believed it would apply to him without Smith and Mitch here. Or if Dillon had shown any—at all—to the innocent Sibyl had been!
“You know the rules of sabers, of course,” Dillon said, as Morgan cleared the boxes from the floor. “You can hit with any part of the sword, but only attacks above the waist score points. There’s still time to fetch electronic scoring equipment, if you don’t want to trust our seconds to—”
“Can we fight now?” interrupted Trace. This was why he liked no-holds-barred fights. The recitation of rules after standards after rituals could drive a man bat-crap crazy. He’d fenced in college. He would remember, more or less.
Dillon drew himself up to his full height, lip curling. “Fine, then.”
And he turned, walked back to the center stripe of tape and turned, assuming the appropriate pose with his sword in the air and his left hand on his hip. “En garde.”
Trace lifted his own sword and nodded, his silent salute a rebellion against the fancy rules. He also didn’t put his hand on his hip, because that just looked stupid. He kept it behind him.
Dillon advanced in quick, short steps.
Trace crossed the floor with longer strides, pointing his saber ahead of him to signal his attack, giving him right of way, and swung toward his opponent’s side. When Dillon raised his sword—Trace could imagine him reciting,
position one
—Trace veered his own strike and thwacked the villain in the neck with the side of the blade. “Point.”
“Ow!” Dillon let go of his hip then, to rub his neck. “You don’t get points for how hard you hit!”
“Nah.” Trace grinned his anger. “It’s just more fun that way. On guard yourself.”
And the fight really started.
For her.
To the rhythmic, cymbal sound of blade on blade, Sibyl leaned around the corner, outside the archive door, and watched. Dillon Charles might be fighting for the sword Trace had found. But not Trace.
Trace had only offered up the sword, called for the duel,
for her.
Glad that she hadn’t set a fire, that she wouldn’t have to hurry, she sank in the shadow against the stone wall and tried to grasp the import of this. Both men moved all over the piste, Dillon in a kind of dance, Trace in a predatory stalk, with their seconds dodging back and forth at the edges to keep track of the thrusts and parries. The choreography of it dated back centuries, millennia.
And this time it was over her?
After Trace’s aggression first caught Dillon by surprise, Dillon quickly recovered. The fight was more evenly matched now. Dillon was clearly the more elegant fencer, protecting an almost perfect three-inch radius between his parrying sword and his body, advancing and retreating along so clear a line that it might as well have been drawn on the floor for him. He varied his short and long steps, sometimes even executing a full ballestra—a two-footed hop into a showy lunge.
His speed and ease with the saber served him well. More than once, he slipped a strike past Trace’s parry through simple practice.
Trace, on the other hand, lost almost as many points in penalties as he scored in hits—but his sheer belligerence held its own power. He knew to use the
forte,
or strong, lower part, of his blade to parry and attack, again and again, wearing Dillon down as the wealthier man fought him off.
My champion,
Sibyl thought, more impressed by Trace’s raw strength than she ever would be by elegance. She knew better than to trust elegance, but Trace’s fighting held…honesty.
He’s not always right. But he’s always trying.
“What’s the matter?” demanded Trace, after scoring a point with a sharp whip against Dillon’s side, then losing it by “missing” and hitting his leg. “Was that too hard? I can be more gentle.”
“Funny,” spat Dillon. “That’s what I told your girlfriend, but she said she likes it rough.”
Sibyl straightened, surprised. She wished she were psychic, so she could let Trace know the truth.
He’s making it up. He’s making it up. He doesn’t even know for sure that we—
With a snarl, Trace bodychecked Dillon right out of the piste and onto his butt.
“Unsportsmanlike conduct!” protested one of Dillon’s seconds. “Corp-a-corps!”
Rather than defending Trace’s points, though, Mitch and Smith were dragging their friend back before he could fall on the downed Comitatus like a grizzly onto a beached salmon. That Trace didn’t swipe them away with one paw said he had more control than Sibyl had feared.
But he still played into Dillon’s taunt when he warned, “Don’t talk about her that way. Not after what you did to her.”
That’s all Dillon needed. “Me? What kind of lies has Isabel been telling you?” He allowed his own friends to help him up, brushed off his fencing whites. “She’s the one who served time in prison, Beaudry. She’s the firebug. Ask the Judge.”
“You told me what you did to her!”
“Did I? As if your word holds any validity among real gentlemen?” Again, Dillon raised his sword. “
En guarde,
bastard.”
“Oh, I’m on guard, you hoity wimp.” Again, Trace attacked aggressively, just shy of losing more points…in part, Sibyl thought, because of Dillon’s reluctance to complain.
Your funeral.
Still, Dillon’s tongue cut as sharply as any blade. “The trailer trash and the ex-con. You two should have your own reality show, because that’s all you’re any good for. Entertainment.”
Clash. Slash. Turn. Trace growled, but said nothing.
Not good with words,
he’d told Sibyl once. Watching, her own throat tight, she wondered how sharply he felt that. How much was he suffering for her?
“Leave the things of real importance—” Dillon parried one of Trace’s attacks, struggling to push away the weight of it without using his illegal left hand for ballast “—like the sword of Charlemagne, to the heroes who deserve it.”
And that, she couldn’t let pass.
Sibyl stepped away from the wall, into full view of the men below. “The sword of Roland!”
Dillon’s expression of shock, as he looked up at her, was priceless.
Even better when Trace, who’d known she would be near, whapped him upside the head with his saber. “Point. I win.”
“That’s…you can’t…!” Now Dillon’s attention pivoted between Sibyl, as she descended the stone steps, and Trace, as he stepped forward to claim the weapon that had begun all this. The seconds, and the doctor, didn’t help the confusion by launching into a cacophony of complaints—on the Comitatus side—and defenses, on the exiles’.
Sibyl watched how Trace hefted the antique blade, far better fit to his size and power than the slim saber had been. At that moment, he didn’t just look like a knight. He looked like her knight.
Some of them could be champions and heroes, after all.
He lifted his gaze to hers. “The sword of who?”
“Roland,” she repeated, reaching the gleaming wood floor and making a beeline for him. He closed the space to her, caught her to him. For a moment, she dared to hope there might still be a chance for them—but no. He drew her behind him for her own safety, so she talked between his ribs and his arm. “I told you about him before, after I did my research, didn’t I? Hero of the
Song of Roland.
His sacrifice saved France—and Charlemagne—from the Saracens. Dillon should know that.”
She peeked around the sturdy, warm wall that was Trace and made a face at the man who’d tried to ruin her life…but, she now thought, had only put it in stasis. Like an evil spell, until her prince woke her.
“It was in the archives,” she added.
Smith had grabbed the dueling saber Trace had dropped, protectively flanking them on one side. “Uh, Sibyl? You were supposed to sneak out, not make a speech.”
Mitch backed to the other side, with little more for defense than one of the wooden boxes. “You ever hear that saying about how they’d tell you but then they’d have to kill you? You ever wonder where that came from?”
“Your family may be loosely connected to Charlemagne,” Sibyl continued to Dillon, having found her voice at long last. “But Trace’s bloodline goes directly back to Roland. Generations back, records show the LaSalles owning the sword of Roland. It’s Trace’s sword, and you’ve known it all along.”
“That just makes it the Judge’s sword,” insisted Dillon.
“Which gives you more of a claim
how?
”
“Don’t you dare accuse me of dishonor, you bitch!”
Trace surged forward. Smith, Mitch and Sibyl barely held him back.
“You want to talk dishonor?” Dillon accused. “All of you broke your vows! And to tell our secrets to an outsider, a
woman!
That could be a blood offense, even if you were in good standing!”
“Told you so,” Mitch grunted, still struggling to hold Trace back.
Rather than pulling from behind, Sibyl slipped in front of Trace—and sure enough, he stopped his struggle rather than risk pushing her into Dillon. While Trace tried to sweep her back again, too gently to succeed, she took a moment to truly look at the man—the boy—who had ruined her life.
What a…nobody.
“Hold them!” insisted Dillon to his friends. “Call the police—I know Captain Harrison. We need to convene an emergency meeting and demand—”
But he stopped when Sibyl closed the distance between them in a quick run, and jumped. She caught one boot against Dillon’s chest, giving her the footing she needed to kick the other, hard, off his face before springing back to land on her feet.
Dillon sprawled onto his back, like a felled tree.
When Dillon’s seconds tried to rush her, Smith elbowed one in the gut and Mitch clotheslined the other. Trace, in the meantime,
lifted
Sibyl away so that he loomed between her and the half conscious Dillon, one big arm protecting her shoulder and side like armor.
In his other hand, he still held his ancestral sword.
“These men didn’t tell me anything,” Sibyl told everyone, speaking loudly to be heard over the continuing scuffles. “Not Smith, not Mitch, not Trace. You know who gave away the existence of the Comitatus?
Him!
”
And she pointed downward.
“Nuh…!” protested Dillon, spitting out some blood with the word as he tried to pull himself onto his elbows. His doctor sank to his knees beside him, trying to check his pulse, examining his injuries.