Page 142 of Play of Shadows
‘You have me all wrong, Mistress.’ He came into a more elegant guard this time, his sword arm straight and true, back arm arched in a graceful curve. ‘Damelas is the actor in the family. Virany was the duellist. Myself, I care for neither audiences nor sword fights. I came here for one thing only.’
‘And what might that be, old man?’
He raised his point a fraction higher. ‘To put you down once and for all, you savage lunatic.’
Margravina Ferica di Traizo’s good humour vanished instantly. It wasn’t like my grandfather to hurl insults; that he did so now was surely a tactic– but it was entirely the wrong one to use on the Vixen of Jereste.
‘Look at yourself,’ she hissed, circling him, forcing him to keep adjusting his footing on the polished oak stage. ‘Your flesh is weak, your eyesight fading.’ She wiggled the tip of her sword in the air mockingly. ‘Can those milky cataracts even follow the movements of my blade?’
He whipped his own point out and nearly– so nearly!– knocked her weapon aside. But the Vixen’s speed was rightly legendary, and she disengaged easily.
‘You’re too slow, old man. Too weak, too blind, too frail. What have you left?’
He winked at her. ‘Naught but my charm, Margravina.’
He spread his arms briefly– as if he, the mad old dodderer,were about to bow to her. I prayed she’d wait, allow him this final bit of mischief, but of course she didn’t. Without warning, she burst into a long, graceful, heart-rending lunge.
I screamed even before the tip of her rapier had struck home, knowing her aim would be true and my grandfather too slow to get out of the way in time.
The old Greatcoat looked down at the steel blade piercing the leather of his coat right over his heart.
And he smiled.
He rapped his knuckles against his chest, and even over the din of the fighting in the courtyard, I heard the clacking.
‘Oh, and the bone plates of my coat,’ he said, grinning at the Vixen. ‘Sometimes those work even better than charm.’
Before she could withdraw her rapier for a second attack, he flung out his hand, his fingers splayed open. A fine yellow powder billowed into the air between them. The Vixen backed away, but she was too late. Howling with rage, she rubbed furiously at her eyes.
‘And ocharis powder,’ he said, stepping first left, then right, as if he meant to run past her. ‘Did I mention that? Nasty stuff,’ he added, waving at her with his free hand. ‘Makes everything blurry.’
Still blinking madly through her tears, the Vixen gave a defiant shout as she lunged again. ‘Too bad for you I can follow your wheezing cackling with my ears just as easily, you old—’
She froze when she saw her blade had missed by almost a foot.
‘Alas, the hallucinogens in the ocharis mess with one’s hearing, too.’
They were so close now that even with his considerably shorter lunge, the tip of my grandfather’s rapier buried itself deep in her thigh. When he withdrew it, she screeched with pain.
He stepped back and waited for her to recover. ‘Now, where were we, my dear?’ He rapped at his chest. ‘You mentioned myenfeebled flesh?’ Next he pointed at her still-tearing eyes. ‘My lousy vision, you now share, and of course’– he put on a show of languidly thrusting at empty air with his rapier– ‘my being far too slow to defeat you. How’s that leg doing?’
The Vixen was unable to put her full weight on her right leg and she was struggling to recover her balance.
For the first time, I thought I saw something akin to respect in her expression when she gazed at my grandfather– respect, and maybe even fear.
‘The paradox of the old,’ he said, suddenly launching into the fight, driving her back with a series of quick thrusts and feints, ‘is that we have precious few years left, and yet still too much time on our hands.’
She tried to encircle his blade and disarm him, but he drove his tip straight for her and she was forced to disengage.
‘It’s more than a year since the day you were meant to duel my grandson.’ He continued harrying her with a flurry of attacks which, while slow, still took all her efforts to deflect now that she was wounded and confounded by the ocharis powder. ‘Would you like to know how I idled away the hours, my dear?’
‘You’re an old man!’ she shouted, swinging her blade wide. ‘You’ll never defea—’
He ducked underneath and came up with a fully extended arm. Had he been even a fraction faster or his reach an inch longer, he might have skewered her throat, but he sounded entirely untroubled by his near miss. ‘I spent all that time conceiving just how a feeble, half-blind old man might defeat the great Vixen of Jereste.’
The lunge he demonstrated might have belonged to a much younger man. It was clean, smooth, a thing of wonder to behold– but it was still too slow, and the Vixen’s eyes were clearing even as she got used to compensating for the wound in her thigh.
But my grandfather wasn’t letting up; he recovered from his lunge and attacked again and again, and even though any sane duellist would have saved what little breath he had to spare, still he spoke. There was a fury I had never before heard in the old man’s voice, a burning rage born of the primal, untamed instinct to protect those he loved.
