“Neither are you,” Kest pointed out, joining us at the barge’s center mast.
“You know perfectly well I couldn’t wear my coat under my disguise. You’re being intentionally abstract.”
“I think you mean obtuse,” Kest said, parrying an opponent’s clumsy swing with his shield and sending the blade screeching along its surface. By the time the guard had his weapon back under control, Kest had already bashed him across the face hard enough to send him toppling back into his fellows.
“I need help—now!” Chalmers shouted.
“I’m on it,” Kest said calmly as Chalmers came struggling up the stairs, hampered both by the young woman in torn, filthy clothes who was clinging desperately to her and by the two guardsmen intent on blocking their escape. Chalmers was waving around that broken cutlass of hers, but she couldn’t even get a decent swing at her enemies for fear of hitting Lady Cestina’s terrified sister.
Speaking of whom . . .
“Face me, Trattari!”
I was barely in time to parry what I thought was a pretty impressive lunge by the bride-to-be. Her smallsword was a lovely piece, the glittering gold inlay positively gleaming, which reminded me that my own rapiers were in sorry need of some love and attention. I felt decidedly shabby next to the radiant bride.
For her part, Lady Cestina was full of passionate fury as she came at me. “Your tyrant Queen’s laws will never take root in our lands while I live,” she cried. For someone who’d apparently been deeply involved in the conspiracy, not to mention the murder of her former husband and the kidnapping of her own family, Lady Cestina’s outrage sounded positively noble.
I deflected a series of thrusts aimed at sensitive parts of my body as I said, “Forgive me, my Lady, but there is one law we all must obey.”
The tip of her sword whipped out suddenly, leaving a tiny cut on my cheek. “What law might that be, Trattari?”
She pressed her attack, and I felt a strange mixture of admiration and sorrow for her. When you spend a good part of your life studying the sword, you like to think it somehow makes you a better person, but the look of glee on Lady Cestina’s face, presumably at the prospect of killing me, was rapidly disproving that theory.
On the other hand, I’ve always argued that there are differences between an experienced duelist and someone who just happens to be good with a sword—differences such as knowing to pay as much attention to the changing terrain as you do to your opponent. When people get stabbed, they bleed, and that blood has to go somewhere. In this case, I’d noted a nice little pool of it on the deck between us, so I gracefully allowed her to press me back—and just at the moment she started smiling at my apparent retreat, she slipped on the slick surface. I contented myself with a gentlemanly thrust to her shoulder—although it was her sword arm, naturally.
“The law we must all obey, Madame, regardless of rank or privilege, is the first rule of the sword: whoever’s first to put the pointy end in the other guy wins.”
She dropped her weapon, grimacing in pain. Margrave Evidalle, who’d thus far been too busy nursing his own injured hand to pay attention to anyone else’s situation, shouted in despair, “Monster! What kind of man are you, to wound a lady?”
I assumed he was being ironic, but Brasti said, “Actually, he used to be offensively squeamish about fighting women as equals.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “You’re really growing as a person, Falcio.”
“A little help here?” Kest called out.
The last of the guardsmen were now focusing their efforts on keeping Kest from helping Chalmers to rescue Lady Mareina.
“Hey,” Brasti called, “you men attacking those nice ladies—!”
Much to everyone’s surprise, several pairs of eyes turned toward him.
“Want to see a magic trick?”
The absurd question was delivered with such ebullient confidence that I swear some of the guards were about to nod yes.
“Watch closely now, because I’m about to make you disappear.”
Despite the fact that I suddenly found myself occupied with a stubborn opponent who was unreasonably good with a mace, I couldn’t help but spare a quick glance. Like a weaver spinning silk in the air, Brasti’s hand whisked back and forth from his quiver, each time sliding an arrow gracefully into place on the string of his bow, pulling, aiming and releasing, all in one smooth action, then repeating the motion. By the time I’d thrust my rapier into the leg of the man with the mace, Brasti had taken down three of the guards harrying Chalmers. “Ta-da,” he said.
I hate Brasti sometimes.
“Regroup! Regroup, damn you all!” Captain Squirrel shouted.
“He does a lot of shouting,” Kest observed.
“He’s their commander,” Brasti said. “Isn’t shouting part of the job?”
“Perhaps—but have you noticed? His orders don’t have much thought behind them. He just barks out vague commands and expects everyone else to figure out what they mean.”
Chalmers and the young woman stumbled toward us as a number of the Margrave’s other functionaries reluctantly obeyed the urging of their Lord, armed themselves with the weapons of the dead and injured and joined the remaining guards, inconveniently making a force larger than the one we’d started fighting in the first place.
“Form up!” Captain Squirrel shouted. “Run these bastards down!”
“I see what you mean now,” Brasti told Kest while nocking another arrow. “‘Form up’—into what? Run us down—how? He’s really not giving these poor fellows much to go on, is he?”
The guards, however, didn’t appear to require much in the way of guidance. Two men with crossbows moved to either side of the main group, while three more settled long halberds into position and took the front of the line where they could use the longer weapons to keep us at bay while their fellows outflanked us. The rest lined up behind them, clearly waiting for the moment to overwhelm us with their superior numbers.
“How would you rate our chances?” I asked Kest.
“Not good. Six of them will die before they manage to down one of us, then three more, but after that we get overrun,” he replied without any discernible concern. “Brasti will fall first.”
“What? Why is it always me?” Brasti tossed his bow behind him and drew his sword. We were in too close for archery now. “Why not Chalmers? She’s not even a proper Greatcoat!”
“At least she doesn’t hold her sword as if it were a snake about to bite her,” Kest pointed out.
“Stop saying I’m not a Greatcoat,” Chalmers growled, bringing her cutlass into a forward guard as she pushed the emaciated Lady Mareina behind her. “And leave me out of . . . whatever this gabbling thing is that you’re doing.”
“It’s called ‘strategy,’” Brasti explained kindly. “Kest tells us how bad our odds are of survival, and then Falcio finds a way to make them worse, usually by—”
“Shut up, Brasti.”
The wedding barge was beginning to look like one of those terribly complicated board games King Paelis used to make me play while expounding on military theory until I threatened to arrest him for violating his own prohibitions on torture. Kest, Brasti, Chalmers, Lady Mareina, and I were boxed in near the front of the boat. Opposite us, the eight remaining guards, bolstered by a dozen of the Margrave’s other retainers, were wielding a variety of swords, maces, crossbows, and knives of varying lengths. Behind them were some twenty wedding guests, many of them armed as well, and each with their very own armored Knight for protection.