“Not very seriously, or after four years you would have been even better.”
He gave a small shrug. “You should know me well enough to know that I do few things seriously, Elana. I am something of a dilettante.”
She paused and studied him again. “How is it that you, too, are alive after all this time?”
Jack grimaced. “In some unfathomable expression of cosmic irony, I was imprisoned in the very same spot where I’d left you, about four years after our little adventure in the Underdark. We were both released from the mythal stone at the same time. You were still petrified. I was not, so the drow put me to work in their fields.”
“Who imprisoned you?”
“I do not know. I have no memory of how I came to be locked in the mythal stone.”
“Fascinating,” she replied. Then she attacked again. This time she changed styles, using a different set of strikes and parries that sorely tried Jack. Her blade bit through his guard to kiss his shoulder-a grazing cut, shallow but bloody. Before he could recover she kicked his knee out from under him. In pure panic Jack reached out for his magic and wove a quick invisibility spell, vanishing from sight. Jelan’s eyes narrowed, and she stabbed at the center of the spot where he’d just been standing; Jack narrowly twisted aside. With uncanny quickness Jelan homed in on his gasp of exertion and the scuffle of his boot, pursuing him closely. Jack swore and abandoned the field, backing off a good ten paces to the other side of the foyer.
“I was wondering when you would resort to magic,” Jelan remarked, cocking her head to one side as she listened for any hint to his location. “Your recent training helps, Jack, but you are still not my equal.”
Jack could think of no good response. His shoulder stung fiercely, and his breath was already coming in pants. The swordswoman smiled menacingly as she caught the sound of his labored breathing and began edging toward him. He could flee the manor, of course, but he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder for Myrkyssa Jelan. On the other hand, he didn’t think he could best her with steel, and no magic of his could touch her. To buy himself a little more time to recover, and to perhaps find a way out of his conundrum, he decided to keep her talking. “How did you escape the drow?” he asked.
“My family’s ancient curse of unmagic finally reasserted itself; the magic that kept me petrified failed,” Jelan replied. She paced forward into the foyer, her katana held in a low guard. “The dark elves on the scene attempted to take me prisoner, but my mail was proof against their poisoned crossbow bolts, and their spells naturally did not affect me.”
“Naturally,” Jack agreed. He held his breath and slipped a few steps from where he’d spoken, hoping to deceive her.
“I took an important-looking fellow hostage, and made him create darkness around us until I could slip away into the Underdark tunnels surrounding their stronghold. It took me five or six days of careful exploration, but I eventually mastered the caverns and passages and found my way back to the surface along the routes the slavers use.” Jelan paused, listening for some sign of Jack. “That, by the way, is one more tally on the score I owe you. I did not appreciate waking up to find myself surrounded by drow, or days and days of hungry monsters and privations as I trekked my way out of the Underdark.”
“The involvement of dark elves a hundred years in the future was something I never could have foreseen during our previous … disagreements, Elana.” Jack moved stealthily again, now sidling into the manor’s large front parlor.
“But you were content to leave me frozen in that damned stone for four full years while you went about your life.”
“Elana, as far as I knew, you were dead,” Jack replied. “And even if I had known that you were alive, I would not have retrieved you from the stone. You were the Warlord, and I am a Ravenaar, loyal to my city-after my own fashion.” He watched as she continued to advance, readying himself to parry or flee if she guessed his location. “If it is any consolation to you, someone has treated me in much the same manner that you feel I treated you. I, too, have lost a hundred years and many friends. A certain sort of justice has already been rendered on my actions; there is no need for you to seek further redress.”
To his surprise, Jelan halted her advance. She stood in the doorway, peering toward a place uncomfortably close to where Jack actually stood with her eyes narrowed in thought. Jack decided to press his point. “If you could have picked any punishment short of running me through, wouldn’t you have inflicted on me exactly the fate you endured? For good or ill, you and I are bound by this common experience. Who else understands what you have lost?”
“I have no use for your sympathy,” Jelan snarled. She glared at the parlor for a good ten heartbeats … but then, with a single angry motion, she slammed her katana back into its sheath. “Yet even a fool may err and speak wisely. If you are telling the truth-which is hard to believe in and of itself-then perhaps fate has indeed balanced the debt in the matter of my imprisonment. It is not for me to defy the wheel of fate, no matter how much I dislike its turnings. I was the Warlord of the Vast; kingdoms trembled at my footsteps. Now that glory lives only in my memory, and yours.”
Jack lowered his rapier cautiously. His shoulder burned where Jelan’s steel had touched him. As strange as he might find his circumstances, at least he hadn’t lost a throne at the same time he’d lost a century. What might that do to a person, even someone as rational and redoubtable as Myrkyssa Jelan? He allowed his invisibility spell to fade away-he couldn’t hold it much longer in any event, given his limited magical strength at the moment-and slowly returned to view. He studied her fierce features for a moment, and asked simply, “What will you do now?”
Jelan snorted. “The same as I have always done. I mean to win the highest place my ambitions and opportunities allow me.” She strode past Jack toward the door, pausing just long enough to poke one mailed finger into his breastbone. “Enjoy your good fortune while it lasts, Jack. Tomorrow may tell a different tale.”
She pushed past him and stormed out into the night. Jack stood staring after her, absently rubbing the sore spot in the middle of his chest where she’d poked him. After a long moment, he recovered enough presence of mind to shut the front door and bolt it securely. “Two things are clear,” he muttered aloud. “One, Edelmon is either hard of hearing or exceptionally discrete. Two, I shall have to issue another standing directive to the staff: Swordplay in the house is always to be investigated immediately.”
With a sigh, he went to go rouse Edelmon to have someone stitch his cut.
After the physician left, Jack spent a very restless night tossing and turning, kept awake by the fresh stitches in his shoulder and the possibility that Myrkyssa Jelan might change her mind and return to murder him. He had no idea what opportunities or ambitions she entertained, but he remembered all too well what she’d once made of herself-conqueror, revolutionary, subversive, enemy to all of Raven’s Bluff. Would she abandon her old designs and start over again somewhere else? Or did she still nurse dreams of making Raven’s Bluff the seat of a kingdom won through her own indomitable will? And if so, how would she proceed? Her formidable network of spies, secret supporters, and devoted henchmen had been shorn away by the passage of the years, but somehow Jack doubted that would daunt the Warlord for long. In fact, if Tharzon was correct in his suspicions about the Moon Daggers- whoever they were-she might already be at work building a new base of power.
Jack was very comfortable in his current situation, with bright prospects indeed. The last thing he needed was for Myrkyssa Jelan to begin stirring up trouble again. Jack had no wish to cross her, but any way he considered the question, he could only conclude that she hadn’t given up on her schemes. If Jelan had escaped the Underdark a few days after Dresimil Chumavh had ordered Jack to recount what he knew of the Warlord, then she’d had at least three or four tendays to settle in to Raven’s Bluff. What had she been doing during that time?
“She’s established enough to catch wind of Seila Norwood’s return and the part I played in it,” he grumbled at the gilt ceiling over his huge bed. “And it seems likely she has something to do with the Sarkonagael and the offered reward.” It was simply too great of a coincidence that the Sarkonagael should be publicly remarked upon in the very month when both Jack and Myrkyssa regained their freedom. Who else would have recognized its importance? Had she stolen it from the poster of the reward? Was she herself the poster? Or was there some other, less obvious connection between them? If Jelan didn’t have the Sarkonagael, she’d be looking for it. And if she did have it, then that was something that would be very good for him to know.
Jack finally drifted off into a fitful slumber. When he woke, he hurried through his breakfast and the morning correspondence-taking note of the engagements that were already beginning to dot his social calendar-then dressed quickly. Sometime during the night he’d come up with an idea that might determine the Sarkonagael’s whereabouts with comparative ease, and he was anxious to test it. He set out from Maldridge before nine bells had
