with a fast one. She feinted a head cut, then a side cut, then came back to attack his head in truth. Thamalon blocked her out with a high parry, then spun his long sword in the beginning of a cheek cut. She raised her broadsword to counter, and his blade streaked down at her leg.
She hopped back and lashed her weapon down in a sweeping low-line parry. The swords rang together, then something jabbed her thigh. But it was only a little sting, and when she glanced down, she saw to her relief that he hadn't wounded her any more grievously than she had thus far managed to hurt him. Her second parry hadn't quite stopped his attack, but it had robbed it of most of its force. She slashed at his sword arm, and he hopped back.
'Suppose I did try to kill my fiancee,' Thamalon said. His back foot slipped in the snow, but he recovered his balance before she could take advantage of it. 'Do you honestly think I'd leave the murder weapon in an unlocked box in my bed chamber forever after, where you could so easily discover it? We have vaults in the cellar for hiding our secrets!'
She scowled. For a second, her weary sword arm quivered, till she willed the tremor away. 'Ordinarily, I would agree that such carelessness is unlike you,' she admitted, 'except for one thing. Until I visited Audra Sweetdreams, I had no way of knowing what the bottle was.'
'Well, do you think I'd leave it where our young children could stumble onto it and take a curious sip?'
'Oh,' she sneered, gliding forward, 'I'm to believe you care about the children now.'
He retreated before her, realized he'd almost backed himself up against the trees, and pivoted to alter course. She chose that moment to attack, and pressed him hard until he succeeded in breaking away.
'Use your head,' he rasped, his chest heaving. 'If you were a shady dealer in illicit potions, would you dispense them in costly and highly recognizable glassware? For that matter, how likely is it that this Audra of yours gave me such a flask, and here she is still using exactly the same kind three decades later? I tell you, Shamur, someone induced her to lie, then planted the bottle in my room.'
'I see,' Shamur said. 'Lindrian was a liar, and so is Audra. Everyone lies but you.'
'They did He. Some schemer has perpetrated an elaborate ruse to provoke you into doing precisely what you're doing now.'
'Why, when the world at large has no idea that the genteel Lady Uskevren knows how to kill?'
'Curse it, woman, whatever you choose to believe, consider this. If you slay me, someone is bound to find out.'
Shamur laughed. 'What do I care? After you're dead, I'll ride for Cormyr, and Selgaunt will never see me again.
There's nothing here I’ll miss.' She grimaced. 'Well, the children, but I've made my peace with that.'
'All right,' he growled, 'if you won't see reason, let's finish it. You've made my life a misery for thirty years, and the Stalker take my soul to hunt through the sky if I let you rob me of what's left of it!' He sprang forward, his long sword streaking at her head.
Retreating, Shamur parried, cut at his chest, and instantly his blade smashed hers aside. She realized then that he hadn't expected his first action to reach its target. He'd been trying to draw a fast, direct stab from her, | which, since he'd been expecting it, he'd easily deflected. | Now his point flashed at her heart.
Leaping backward, she parried. His point dipped, evading her sweeping blade, and rose to threaten her torso anew. He bellowed a war cry and lunged. She took another retreat, spun her broadsword in a circular parry, and closed him out a split second before his weapon could pierce her breast.
She cut at his eyes, and the long sword swept up, forming a horizontal bar that hoisted her blade above his head. Holding her weapon trapped at the juncture of his blade and his guard, he stepped in close and pivoted his point down for a jab at her abdomen. Sucking in her belly, she flung herself around him. Her sword scraped free, and she thrust at the expanse of exposed ribs under his upraised arm. Not one fencer in a hundred could have whirled and parried that attack in time, but he did, then came at her again.
She almost felt as if she were dueling a new opponent, for his current mode of fighting, a relentless onslaught of strong, lethal attacks, was utterly different from the defensive style of evasions and counterattacks he'd employed before. She thought that if he'd battled this way from the beginning, he might even have defeated her, but he'd waited too long to start. He was tired now, and after a few more fierce exchanges, it seemed to her that his actions were finally starting to slow. Only a bit, but so evenly matched were they that a bit was all she needed.
She stepped just a hair into the distance, inviting attack, and he obliged her with a feint at her knee, then jabbed a cut at her chest. She stepped forward and swept her blade from right to left. The captain of her father's household guard, the veteran soldier who'd given an importunate, boisterous little girl her first instruction in swordplay, had taught her it was foolish to try such an action. If her opponent thwarted her attempt to defend, her own advance would likely carry her onto his blade. But Shamur didn't fail. She'd sensed exactly where and how Thamalon's true attack would come, and she bashed his sword aside and cut with her own.
Thanks to her advance, she was dangerously close, and he scrambled backward. Feinting and disengaging repeatedly, she pursued him.
He kept retreating, the long sword whirling and leaping from side to side and up and down as he searched for her blade. But perhaps she'd unconsciously assimilated his favorite patterns, the ones he fell into when pressed so hard he had not an instant to think, for she anticipated and avoided every parry. Each spring of her long legs brought her point a little closer to his flesh, and she thought that here at last was the phrase that would end with her broadsword buried in his vitals.
Then the heel of his back foot caught on something hidden beneath a drift of snow. He stumbled, his sword arm flailing too wide to have any hope of deflecting her attack. She truly had him now, and he knew it; she could read the knowledge in his stricken expression. There was no panic there, but frustration and a final flare of defiance.
Screaming, she cut at his neck.
And then pulled the broadsword up over his head a split second before it could strike home.
She hadn't known she was going to spare him, and it took her a moment to understand why. Though his arguments hadn't persuaded her, they'd carried a certain weight, and more telling still had been the fact that up until the very end, when he'd despaired of ever convincing her, he hadn't once attempted a mortal blow.
He'd always cut and thrust at her limbs, never her torso or head. His reluctance to take her life even to protect his own suggested more powerfully than words that perhaps he wasn't the fiend she'd thought him after all.
How strange to discover that somewhere down deep in her mind, she'd been working toward such a conclusion, without even knowing it until now.
Thamalon recovered his balance, came back on guard, but made no threatening actions. 'I take it you've had a change of heart,' he said.
'Shut up!' she snarled, for her anger had by no means dissipated. The resentment that had smoldered in her heart for thirty years, and which the tale of the poisoning had fanned into full-blown hatred, still burned inside her. but now it was muddled with doubt and other painful feelings she couldn't even identify.
'Forgive me,' Thamalon said gently, 'I wasn't trying to mock you. Why don't we put our swords up?'
'You might as well,' said a mild tenor voice.
Chapter 8
Shamur whirled. At the perimeter of the snowy glade, figures wavered into view, evidently emerging from some sort of glamour that had rendered them invisible before. Most were men armed with crossbows and blades of various sorts. Judging from their bearing, they knew how to use such weapons, but she didn't think they were warriors, or at least, not the sort of warriors whom any honorable lord would recruit for his retinue. Their paucity of body armor, tawdry finery, slouching postures, smirks, and sneers all suggested the bully and the bravo. They'd stationed themselves around the edge of the clearing so as to surround the Uskevren, whose final passage of arms had carried them back to the center of the open space.
Standing safely behind a pair of the ruffians was a man about as tall as Thamalon, his features concealed
