Warstalker's Track (27 page)

The second round was over almost before it began. Yd feinted left, then up, as though to cleave her head in twain, then low again, on LaWanda’s unshielded side. She tried to swerve away, but the blow caught her hip—fortunately, with the flat of the blade. She felt the cut as a clear edge of agony and knew from the warmth trickling down her leg that her opponent had succeeded.

“Blood!” Aife cried again, motioning them back toward the center. Then, once more: “Lay on!”

This round lasted longer. Both parties had hardened to their tasks, and now that blood had been drawn from either side, the reality of the situation had sunk in, resulting in cold, grim determination from both of them not to yield. Or that’s how LaWanda felt, what she read in Yd’s gold-brown eyes.

Blows flew. Blows were blocked. Blows were evaded. Once Yd jumped straight up above a low one LaWanda was certain would take out his ankles. Once she ducked just in time to avoid one that could’ve bisected her nose. The follow-up
did
sever a pair of her bead-tipped braids, but she never faltered as they fell to the mossy sward.

Still, they were far more evenly matched than she’d expected, perhaps due to Yd’s ingrained aversion to iron. Or would’ve been, had her injured leg not started to assert itself. Not that she couldn’t endure, but it was a distraction nonetheless, and more to the point, enough of a hindrance that she kept favoring it, which did screwy things to her balance and made her play to the right more than she liked. That was Yd’s sword side, after all, and he could block most effectively there.

Which, she realized grimly, had been his plan from the start. Especially when blows began to rain fast and thick on her off side, forcing her back, which stressed her injured limb.

And when a particularly vicious blow sent her staggering, it buckled. She fell backward. There being no rules to prevent it, Yd was on her at once. His first blow blooded her other hip at the same time her own caught him in the thigh. His next swept the machete from her hand. The follow-through nicked her throat with exquisite delicacy just above her jugular.

“Hold!”
Aife yelled furiously. “Blood, and blood again, and Dana’s blood on you, Yd, if you do not hold at once!”

“The time for a hold was after my first blow,” Yd replied amiably. “She struck her next out of form and thereby granted me right to the same.”

LaWanda could practically see steam seething out of Aife’s eyes. “Aye,” she spat. “You have the right of it, though I would have expected better of you!”

LaWanda sat up, one hand on her neck, which came away red. Aikin, bless him, returned her weapon. “But—” she began. “We’d only…started!”

Aife shook her head. “Rules are rules,” she growled. “And the rules of combat are sacred.” She eyed Yd angrily. “I had hoped for chivalry. But, as I have heard said more than once of late: there is chivalry and there is war.”

“And there’s a woman needs tending right now,” Myra finished, as she helped LaWanda to her feet, already undoing her jeans, the better to access the wounds. LaWanda let her, stupidly glad to have on clean black panties. Blood gleamed against dark skin, the opened flesh nigh as bright where it showed in inch-long gashes on either thigh, both weeping freely but neither displaying more than superficial damage. “I can heal most of that,” Aife offered. “When this is done.”

Yd was calmly cleaning his blade. Neither of his wounds had vanished, LaWanda noted with smug satisfaction, and in fact seemed to be growing larger and festering besides. She wondered if that would put paid to the other challenges.

Evidently not, she discovered a short while later, when, thirst freshly slaked with water from an earthenware jug, the Faery warrior strode boldly up to Aife and said, quite calmly, “I believe there was to be a second trial.”

Aife glared at him, then set her jaw. “Very well, if haste you desire, haste you shall have. The next challenge will be more subtle.”

LaWanda wasn’t certain, but it seemed to her that Yd’s face darkened at that, as though he were not assured of victory. Yet still his voice was calm when he replied. “Very well, Lady, name your weapon and name your challenger.”

“The weapon will be the hand itself,” Aife shot back sweetly. “The challenger will be Myra Buchanan.”

*

Myra nearly strangled on the cup of water she’d been drinking when she heard her name pronounced. “I’m no warrior,” she choked, then realized what Aife had actually said. “The hand? You mean…literally?”

“A contest of art,” Aife affirmed, glaring hard at Yd. “You, Annwyn-man, should hold one in as high regard as the other.”

“For all we are none of us as skilled as mortal men,” Yd added with more than a touch of sarcasm.

“Which seemed not to concern you at all in matters of arms,” Aife retorted.

“She had steel.”

“You had immortality and experience.”

“And this time?”

“She has talent; you have had centuries in which to learn.”

“Very well,” Yd conceded. “Set the terms.”

Aife’s brow furrowed, nor did she reply at once. For her part, Myra’s head was awhirl as she sought on one hand to tend her injured best friend and on the other to puzzle out what Aife might possibly have in mind. In the meantime, she tried not to think about the price of defeat, as she and Aikin masked LaWanda’s wounds with spiderwebs and spit before binding them with surgical tape, Piper massaged his lady’s temples solicitously, and Alec alternately offered water, stared at the surrounding waste, and paced. Likely he’d figured out that one challenge remained, and that it would devolve on himself, Piper, or Aikin. Which didn’t bode well if either of the first were called.

“The problem,” Aife announced eventually, “is determining who is to judge. Were I to give you pen and paper and ask you to prepare a drawing of this tower, then who is unbiased enough to name the better when everyone present has seen Myra’s skill and knows her style? And since there must be some element of equality, what I have decided is this. I shall take water and the earth beneath us, and from them you shall both sculpt heads in my likeness. Neither Alec, Aikin, nor Piper shall witness this making. When you have done, they shall join us and chose whose work is the truer image, for with three judges, there is no chance of a tie. LaWanda, you may stand as witness.”

“Sounds fair,” LaWanda agreed. Myra had no choice but to concur. Aife had been clever, too, for she surely knew that while Myra was facile indeed with pencil and paper, paint and brush, she hadn’t nearly so much experience working 3-D. As for Yd—she’d soon find out.

In far too short a while, they were ready.

True to her word, Aife had contrived the medium: water from the pitchers, claylike earth from beneath the mossy sward, mixed to a plastic soup Myra realized early on was like the best china clay she’d ever seen, so white and fine it was. Whatever else transpired, working with this material would be a joy.

“Half of one hour you have,” Aife informed them, flourishing Aikin’s watch as she motioned the judges inside. Myra felt a pang of regret at that; a cheering section would’ve been nice. God knew Wannie had had one. At least she
had
Wannie, though her friend was forbidden to speak, her role that of not-so-neutral observer.

Aife had chosen a place equidistant between the two, with the light falling full in her face so as to give neither contestant the advantage of heightened shadows. “Ten, nine, eight,” she counted, her Faery accent adding a musical lilt to the words Myra found almost too soothing. She shook herself roughly, wondered briefly if blood had proved thicker than friendship, and Aife was about to betray them, as once she’d betrayed Alec. And then Aife whispered, “Begin,” and reality narrowed to Aife’s face and Myra’s fingers.

Not once did she look aside to gauge Yd’s progress, nor to LaWanda for support. She merely stared at Aife, analyzed each element of her face with the same calm deliberation she utilized when executing a commissioned portrait, then let her fingers do the rest. It was easier than painting, actually, because mistakes were more easily rectified; whereas a blob of red or white in the wrong place—well, you’d live with that a long time, unless you were working with acrylics, which she loathed. Or unless you wanted to negate good work with the bad by swabbing with turpentine.

And it wasn’t as if Aife was difficult to look at, though she discovered early on that one could in fact be too perfect, so that she found herself longing for some mole, scar, or asymmetry to give that cool, vaguely Latin beauty genuine character.

As usually happened when she was working, she lost all sense of time, and so was more than a little startled when Aife called out that only five minutes remained. And then that time was up.

Myra blinked up from her work, amazed to find anything still existing beyond clay, her fingers, and Aife’s too-faultless features. Color itself was a surprise, for surely the sky had not been so intensely purple, Wannie’s skin such an iridescent brownish black. “Leave now,” Aife commanded, including all present in her gaze. “I would have no stray gesture influence the judging.”

Myra grunted her assent, wiping her filthy hands on her thighs as she rose. What difference did clean clothes make, after all, when the fate of Worlds rode in the balance? A moment later, she was helping LaWanda, who was limping slightly but trying not to show it, inside. An instant after that, the judges had been summoned.

The waiting seemed to take forever, and she passed it inspecting the tapestry in which Yd had hidden, trying neither to acknowledge nor ignore to the point of insult that strange new adversary, who, though overtly their foe, seemed in fact to bear them no real rancor. “The library,” she said eventually, not looking at him.

“What about it?”

“Are you its guardian?”

“I guard everything in Tir-Gat.”

“So that nothing can be taken away?”

“That is correct.”

“Not even knowledge?”

“That depends on the knowledge.”

She’d already started to frame her next query when the door opened and Aife eased in, with Piper at her heels. Piper’s grin told the story.

“It was not so easy a contest as you imagined, Myra,” Aife cautioned. “Though you have talent, Yd has the sharper eye and, for all he is a warrior, the softer fingers. Your victory was not unanimous.”

“Thank you,” Myra murmured. “I know it was hard to orchestrate that. You did your best to ensure that it was fair.”

“Aye, you did,” Yd acknowledged, though his face showed far less certainty. “You should know, incidentally, that though you call me warrior, and I
am
the guardian here, I would style myself more a scholar.”

Aife’s eyes narrowed. “You say you are a scholar, Yd of Tir-Gat, Alban, and Annwyn? Are you then a druid? Or might you be a bard? Such is the way they call scholars in both those latter lands.”

“I have studied both styles,” Yd admitted. “I have, as yet, completed neither.”

“Then you have skill with music?”

“With dulcimer, harp, and pipes.”

“Pipes…” Aife repeated, with calculated calm. “Very well, you named the weapon, I did not. Pipes it is! And to contest with you, I name our own master musician: James Morrison Murphy!”

*

To his very great surprise, Piper didn’t bolt when he heard his name announced. Or perhaps it was simply that LaWanda was holding his hand with an iron grip that would’ve done a bear trap proud. In any event, he tried to fight down the fear he not only felt, and that had already set his heart to racing, but which had just poured a bitter taste into his mouth, so that he had to concentrate to understand what was said.

And then he looked at LaWanda and knew that however strong she was, he had to be her match. He was taller, after all, and his muscles—his actual
strength—were
equal to hers. He was decently fast when he had to run, and had a fine set of lungs from playing pennywhistle and Highland pipes, and decent shoulders from pumping the bellows of the Uilleann pipes he wore now. And Wannie had faced up to that big guy and all but spat in his face when she knew he’d be swinging a sword at her. This was only a test of piping, of which, so people kept telling him, he was master. What did
he
have to fear?

Losing, for one thing. The tally stood one-and-one; the outcome of their quest therefore rested on him. What would happen should he lose, no one had dared ask, but from what he recalled from hanging out with Myra’s younger pals, these Faery guys were culturally, if not genetically, Celts. And Celts took heads, especially the less urbane variations, such as this fellow, with all those tattoos, seemed to represent.

On the other hand, no less a person than Nuada Silverhand had praised his piping. And the King of the Faeries—Lugh, he thought, though he’d never seen the man’s face that awful time ago—had asked him to play as though his life depended on it. But he’d also enjoyed that playing, else he’d have demanded it end.

“I will!” he said abruptly. “And may God have mercy on my soul.”

LaWanda regarded him sharply, and he knew that she knew he took this very seriously indeed, to thus invoke the Deity. He was a good Catholic boy, after all; in his heart. And good Catholic boys did such things.

Yd lifted an eyebrow. “I have no pipes.”

Aife raised one in turn. “Nor do you need them, if Piper will lend his. There is no way for musicians to contest at once, save by volume of noise. You will therefore have to vie separately. We will all go outside, leaving the two of you within. You will chose which of you will go first, and you will each perform a lament, a jig, and a reel. I have heard neither of you perform, not even when I was a cat, for my memories of that time already grow dim. Therefore, I alone will judge. Is this acceptable to you?”

“I guess so,” Piper mumbled.

“It is!” Yd boomed, with what Piper read as forced bluster.

“We will leave you to it, then,” Aife sighed, and ushered them all from the tower.

Piper found himself alone with Yd, who’d drifted forward to stand opposite. “I don’t like this,” Piper told him. “I want you to know that.”

“Nor I standing guard in this lonely place,” Yd replied, his voice tinged with such genuine regret Piper felt his eyes misting.