him, and that gave her enough room to scramble free, no art or skill to it now, only desperation. The leader was back on his feet by now, swinging his weapon again. Erin parried the first blow, barely, on her knees, took a kick to the midsection, and spat blood as she came up.
“You picked the wrong people to mess with, bitch,” the leader said and went for an overhand stroke, aimed at her head.
There was no time to dodge, no time to parry. All Erin could do was duck down and thrust up with her spear. She felt the crunch as it went through flesh, expected to feel the impact of her foe’s weapon in her own body, but for a moment, things just froze. She dared to look up, and he was there, transfixed on the end of her spear, so busy staring down at the weapon that he hadn’t finished his own attack.
It is a fine thing to be lucky, and a stupid thing to rely on it, Swordmaster Wendros’s voice sounded in her mind.
The knifeman was still down, struggling to rise.
“Mercy, please,” the knifeman said.
“Mercy?” Erin said. “How much mercy did you show to the people you robbed, and killed, and raped? When they begged you, did you laugh at them? Did you run them down when they fled? How much mercy would you have shown me?”
“Please,” the man said, standing. He turned to run, probably hoping he could outpace Erin in the trees.
She almost let him go, but what would he do then? How many more people would die when he thought he could get away with it again? She reversed her blade, hefted it, and flung it.
Over a long distance, it wouldn’t have worked, because the spear was shorter than a true javelin, but over the short space between them it sailed through the air perfectly, plunging through the bandit point first and bringing him to the ground. Erin stepped over to him, set a foot on his back, and dragged it out. Lifting it, she brought it down sharply on his neck.
“That’s as much mercy as I have today,” she said.
She stood there, then moved to the side of the track, suddenly nauseous. It had felt so right and so easy when she’d been fighting, but now…
She threw up. She’d never killed anyone before, and now the horror and the stench of it were almost overwhelming. She knelt there for what felt like hours before her mind insisted that she should move. Swordmaster Wendros’s voice came to her again…
When it is done, it is done. You focus on the practical, and you don’t regret any of it.
That was easier said than done, but Erin forced herself to her feet. She cleaned her sword on their clothes, then dragged the bodies to the side of the track. That was the hardest part of all of it, because they were all bigger than she was, and a corpse felt heavier than a living thing too. By the time she was done, there was more blood on her clothes than there had been from the fight, not to mention the cut where the knifeman had struck. She had the strange, sudden thought that she was going to have to make sure they got to a servant to mend before her mother saw them. She laughed at that, and for several moments, she couldn’t stop laughing.
Battle nerves. The greatest threat to a swordsman, and the greatest drug the world has ever known.
Erin stood there a moment or two longer, letting the excitement of the fight run through her veins. She’d killed men, and she’d done more than that. She’d proved herself. The Knights of the Spur would have to take her now.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Renard kept coming to the Inn of the Broken Scale for three main reasons, and none of them had to do with the frankly terrible beer. The first was the barmaid Yselle, who seemed to have a thing for burly men with red hair like him, and who seemed to alternate between accusing him of cheating on her and demanding that he come by more often.
The second reason was that, on the days when he was inclined to try to make an honest living, they didn’t mind him taking out his lute and playing a few of the old ballads. Mostly, Renard didn’t feel like doing it, but sometimes his fingers itched for the performance.
The third reason was that his fingers more often itched for other things, and the inn was a good place to hear rumors.
“It sounds too much like a story,” he said to the man opposite him, carefully using the distraction to switch a card for one of those he had hidden in his sleeve.
“Ye can call it a story if you like, but I saw it with my own eyes,” the man insisted. He was dressed in rough sailor’s clothes, and claimed that he worked on the ships that sailed the long route out, away from the crippling rapids of the river and across the sea. That alone made Renard suspicious. Sailors were madmen; had to be, when it was far easier to trade via the bridges between the Northern and Southern Kingdoms than to stray into the dangers of deep water.
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