and heavy beaded necklace; also a loose robe that billowed in the breeze. She sat quietly in the chair, arms folded neatly across her lap, but her expression was severe.
'Now,' the metri said, 'let it be settled, this argument of service.'
'Here and now,' I said skeptically.
'Indeed.'
I looked from her to her servant. 'How is she?'
He seemed to understand I asked him because she would not give me the truth, even if she answered. 'Well enough,' he said.
'Much improved,' the metri snapped, clearly annoyed. 'Now, be about it. If you win, you may be excused from service beyond our original agreement. If she wins, you will stay on an additional length of time to be decided by me.'
I shook my head.
The metri looked at Nihko. 'Make him.'
Nihko looked at me. 'I can.'
Del threw down her wooden blade. 'I want no part of this. I agreed to dance with Tiger, but I will not do so if he is forced. It abrogates the honor codes and oaths.'
'What 'honor codes and oaths'?' Prima asked scathingly. 'He's his own kind of ikepra. He has no such thing.'
'We make our own,' Del declared, stung. 'He and I, between us.'
Herakleio hooked a foot beneath her wooden sword and scooped it into the air, where he caught it easily. 'Then do so,' he suggested. 'The metri has hired you. You accepted. Is that not honor? And dishonor if you refuse?'
Prima's tone was sly. 'You renounced your honor, Sandtiger; she has not. Do you expect her to break all of her oaths simply to be with you? Or has she none left because she is with you?'
The terrace was round, but we were cornered anyway. Del and I did not even bother to look at one another. They had found the holes in our individual defenses and exploited them perfectly.
I took up the blades from the wall and handed one to Del. Her eyes searched mine, asking the question.
In answer, I walked to the center point of the terrace. It wasn't a proper circle, but our minds would make it one. I leaned, set down the weapon with a faint metallic scrape, turned my back on it and paced to the wall farthest from the spectators. Torchlight filled my eyes; I half-lidded them against it.
Prima's tone was startled. 'Don't you want to practice first? To test the blades?'
Del walked deliberately to the center, bent, set her sword alongside mine. Rising, she asked, 'Why? If they are meant to break, they will. But I doubt that's what you want.'
'Indeed not,' the metri said testily. 'This is to be an honorable engagement.'
Herakleio grinned widely. 'Then perhaps you would do better to excuse the Sandtiger. He has none.'
'Enough,' Del said sharply, taking position across from me.
I didn't look at Herakleio, but he knew whom I meant. 'Say it.'
But it wasn't Herakleio. Nihko said, 'Dance.'
Feet pounded, gripped, slid against tile; bodies bent; hands snatched, closed; blades came up from the ground. They met, rang, clashed, scraped apart, clashed again as we engaged. The blows were measured, but not so restrained that no damage would be done if one of us broke through. There is no sense in pulling back when one intends to win, or if one intends to learn. To do so alters the dance into travesty, with nothing learned and thus nothing gained even in victory.
We tested one another carefully. Last time we'd met it hadn't been sparring, hadn't been a contest to settle a complaint, but a dance against the magic that had infested my sword, that had wanted me as well. I had lost that dance, but in the losing I won. Del lured Chosa Dei out of my blade into hers, then purposefully broke her jivatma. We had not since then set foot in any kind of circle, being more concerned with surviving a journey by ship.
Now here we were, off that ship at last and on the soil of what I'd begun to believe actually was my homeland, dancing for real at the behest of a woman who had no idea what it meant to be what we were.
Or else she knew very well and used this dance to prove it.
The night was loud with sound, the clangor and screech of steel. As always, with Del and me, there was another element to the object, an aspect of the dance that elevated it above the common. We were that good together. In the circle. In bed.
–step –thrust –spin –
–catch blades –catch again –
–slide –step –thrust –
–parry –again –slash –
It was a long dance, one that leached from us all thoughts of the metri, her intentions, of Prima and her first mate, of Herakleio and his attitude. As always, everything else in the world became as water against oilcloth: shed off to pool elsewhere, while inside the circle, our dwelling, we stayed dry, and warm, and so focused as to be deaf and blind. But we were neither of us deaf or blind; we marked movement, responses, the slight flexing of muscle beneath taut flesh; heard the symphony of the steel, the rhythm of our breathing, the subtle sibilance of bare soles moving against stone.
–slash –catch –scrape –
–the shriek of steel on steel –
Walls of air, the metri had called it. My home was built of walls I fashioned in the circle, because only here could I define myself, could I find my worth in the world. Only here had I become a man. Not in the use of my genitals, a use once copious and indiscriminatory; nor in the language of my mouth, sometimes vulgar, always ready, but inside the heart, the soul. Inside the circle I was whatever I wished to be, and no one at all could alter that.
Except me.
And I had.
One day at Aladar's palace, when I had broken all the oaths.
'No-' Del said.
I grinned.
'Tiger-'
I laughed.
With an expression of determination, Del tried the move I'd chastised her for.
'Oh, Del-' Disgust. I couldn't help it. Because now I had no choice. I broke her guard, went in, tore the hilt from her hand. 'What did I tell you?' I roared. 'Did you think I was joking? That kind of move could get you killed!'
Furious, she bent and retrieved the sword. 'Again.'
'Del-'
'Again, curse you!'
Again. As she insisted.
I stepped back, renewed the assault. Saw Del begin the maneuver again. I moved to block it, break it, destroy it-and this time something entirely different happened. This time it was my sword that went crashing to the tile. And I was left nursing a wrenched thumb.
'What in hoolies was that?' I asked.
'The reason I created that maneuver.'
'But I defeated it the first time.'
'Not the second.'
'You'd have been dead the first time. There wouldn't have been a second.'
'Maybe,' Del said, 'maybe not. Not everyone fights like you.'
'No one fights like me,' I corrected with laborious dignity, then shook out my thumb.
'Shall I kiss it?' The irony was heavy.
I bared my teeth at her. 'Not in front of witnesses.'
