Traitor's Blade

THE GAME OF CUFFS

Other than the Lady, who ignored us, and Trin, who was reasonably friendly with us, the emotions we elicited from most of the caravan crew during our first week ranged from outright hatred to whatever it is that’s much, much worse than outright hatred. It made the first part of the journey a lot like – well, a lot like everything else we did.

After an awkward first night of repeated references to ‘the dead tyrant’ we had served, the ‘whore’s sons’ that formed our order and the ‘tattered, stinking rags’ that were our greatcoats, we nearly came to knives with our fellow guards, so I decided it would be best if we spent most of our evenings by ourselves, on watch for the caravan and on watch for our own backs.

Trin came by, after the others had eaten, with food – I suppose it was a logical thing to do, since otherwise I’m certain we would have been accused of taking more than our share, but I still thought it was remarkably decent of her. She was pretty, with long dark hair and lightly tanned skin. Her eyes, when you could see them, were the colour of stream water. She even sat with us for a while, listening to our stories and asking questions about the old laws, giving her shy smile when one of us threw in a joke here or there.

She told us very little about the Lady she’d served her whole life, other than that she was a noble daughter of a great house. Trin had been first a playmate, when they were children and Trin’s mother was the Lady’s nanny, then later a companion for her lessons. Now she was the Lady’s handmaiden. I wondered what that must have been like, to start as a child, a playmate, and then every passing year become less and less an equal and more and more a servant. Trin appeared to think it was the most natural thing in the world, though, and laughed at Brasti when he suggested she could always steal the Lady’s best dress, run away to a southern city and claim to be a princess since she looked just like one.

‘Saints of my mother, no,’ Trin said. ‘That wouldn’t work at all!’

‘And why not?’ Brasti asked. ‘You’re certainly pretty enough.’

Trin looked down and laughed. ‘With hands like these?’ she said, holding up hands that were nicely shaped, but with the telltale calluses of a servant.

‘Let me see here,’ Brasti said, catching her hand and inspecting it closely. ‘As I suspected, as smooth as lake water and bright as gemstones. Now, as to taste—’ Then he leaned in to kiss the back of her hand.

‘Brasti?’ I said, a placid smile on my face.

‘Yes, Falcio?’ he asked, turning to give me one of those pouty, angry looks of his.

‘I was just thinking how long it’s been since we practised our feather-parries. Shall we get some work in tonight during first watch?’

‘Feather-parries? Why in hells would I want to do that?’

A feather-parry uses the back of the hand to deflect a blade. It’s sometimes necessary when your blade is already engaged, but it’s not pleasant – that’s why no one ever really wants to practise feather-parries. You come away with hands that sting for hours.

I kept smiling. ‘Because it might save your life one day. Perhaps today, even.’

Brasti let go of Trin’s hand.

‘Bowmen don’t practise feather-parries. We need our hands to have precision and control.’

Trin looked at him quizzically. ‘But don’t swordsmen need the same qualities?’

Brasti scoffed. ‘Them? Nah, it’s all just swinging and poking with swordsmen. Just “put the pointy end in the other fellow first” or whatever. An archer – now, an archer needs real skill.’

I rolled my eyes at Kest. We’d heard this lecture many times before, but Trin hadn’t, so she stepped right into it.

‘Is it really so hard?’ she asked.

‘My dear, not one man in a hundred can be a proper archer. And not one in ten thousand can become a master.’

‘And you are one? A master archer, I mean?’

Brasti smiled and contemplated the nails of his right hand. ‘One might fairly say so, I believe.’

‘One says so frequently,’ I observed.

‘But how did you become a master archer? Is it something you’re born with? Did you have a teacher?’

‘I did.’ He said the words as if they were full of secrets.

‘Well,’ Trin asked, ‘what was his name?’

‘No idea.’ Brasti looked solemn. ‘We never talked about it.’

‘You never talked about your own names? You studied archery from this man, but he never told you his name?’

‘It just never came up. I was poaching rabbits on the Duke’s land one day, barely old enough to be away from my mother’s skirts, and he just stepped out from behind a tree.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘Tall – very tall. He had long grey hair down to his shoulders in what we call archer fashion.’

‘Why “archer fashion”?’ she asked, sounding fascinated.

‘Down to the shoulders: easy to tie back.’

‘You mean like yours?’

‘Exactly like mine.’

‘And he taught you the bow, but he never taught you his name.’

‘Correct. Now that I think about it, I don’t think we ever spoke at all.’

Trin gave him a suspicious look, probably thinking that he might be making fun of her, but Brasti smiled reassuringly. ‘My dear, truth be told, it’s a story that’s legendary in the telling, and these two louts have heard it before. Perhaps tomorrow night I might tell you the story in a more private setting?’

Trin blushed, Brasti grinned, and later that night Kest and I threatened to beat him senseless if he tried to bed the girl while we were with the caravan.

The next day we set out again on the ancient road that caravaners call ‘The Spear’ because it runs the north-south trade route in a fairly straight line. Having a long, straight thoroughfare was a good idea in principle, since you could make good time between trading destinations from Cheveran and Baern in the south all the way to Orison in the north, passing close enough to spit at other major cities like Hellan and even – though Saints keep me from it – Rijou. But if having a long, straight road was good for caravans, for brigands it was like sucking at the tit of Saint Laina. Since we had no King now, we had no proper military presence to protect the trade routes, and no foresters to keep trees and brush from turning both sides of the road into perfect hiding places for anyone with a sword and a hungry belly, planning on turning to banditry. The Dukes had no interest in maintaining the roads since the Lords Caravaner refused to pay tariffs, while the caravans themselves were usually in competition so no one wanted to pay for the bread that someone else would eat. So the clearings gradually began to grow over and the bandits laid ambushes at their leisure. Things got worse if you tried to run for it, as you were stuck in a long, straight tunnel, perfect for men on horseback to out-pace the nags pulling your heavy wagons. All in all, it was a good time to be a brigand.

We were attacked twice in that first week. The first time, we nearly lost a man because the others wouldn’t stand formation with Kest, Brasti and me. Fortunately, the brigands’ charge lasted only a few minutes and the three of us took them out with no serious damage to our own party. The wound I had taken in town had settled down a bit and I could move reasonably well, so long as I was willing to pay the price later when it ached like the devil at night.

After that fight, the caravan captain threatened the other guards with the lash and they quickly learned their lesson. When the second attack came, we were ready. Eight men on foot, four with crossbows, tried to ambush us. But Feltock had the wagons circle quickly while we rushed the brigands and Brasti took out the crossbows one at a time. A crossbow is a good weapon if it’s loaded and your opponent isn’t too far away, but a good bow can outdistance and outshoot a crossbow two-to-one – and, as I might have mentioned earlier, Brasti never missed.

Eventually the rest of the brigands realised they were likely going to get picked off one by one, so they charged us. I fought side by side with Kest and Blondie – who had a name, but it turned out everyone really did call him ‘Blondie’, so I did too. He was solid with the war-sword once you got him away from Kurg, the black-haired man with the long beard. The two had fought together for years and they had fallen into bad habits.

It didn’t take long for us to chase off the bandits, but Feltock still wasn’t happy with the crew’s performance and he decided it was our job to train the men, ready for any more attacks we might encounter.

‘I’m not paying you to just sit on your horses,’ he said. ‘If you’re supposed to be such great warriors, then let’s see some proof of it.’

‘We did beat back two groups of brigands already,’ I pointed out.

‘Piss-poor peasants with bad weapons and no discipline – barely covers your supper, if you ask me.’

‘We could beat up your men some more,’ Brasti offered helpfully.

‘Just you go and try it, tatter-cloak,’ Kurg shouted. Kurg – Black-beard – still hadn’t quite found it in his heart to forgive me for the beating he’d taken at the caravan market.

‘Shut your mouth,’ Feltock shouted back. ‘You’ll do what you’re damned well told. You’re the last man should be bragging right about now. Got beat like a girl, you did!’

‘See,’ I said to Kest, ‘it’s not just me.’

Kest ignored me. ‘There’s a problem,’ he said.

I was about to ask what, but Brasti grabbed his longbow and slid off his horse. ‘I hear it, too,’ he said.

‘What?’ Feltock demanded. ‘What in all the hells are you talking about?’

I couldn’t hear it either, but I’d learned to trust Kest and especially Brasti about these things.

‘Men,’ Brasti said. ‘A dozen at least, and from the sounds of the horses, they’ve been riding hard.’

‘Arms up!’ Feltock shouted. ‘Circle the damned wagons around the carriage and guard the Lady!’

‘There’s no time,’ I said. I could hear the horses now; they’d be here before we could rearrange the caravan.

‘Bloody trees,’ Feltock said. ‘Can’t see far enough to watch for bandits, and the damned Caravan Council ain’t got no protection on the roads since—’ He realised what he was about to say and let it slide.

I didn’t. ‘Since the Dukes killed our King and the Greatcoats were banned from protecting the trade roads?’ I offered.

‘Falcio,’ Kest said, pulling his sword from its sheath as the first of the horses came into view. ‘You’re doing it again.’

‘Doing what?’ I asked, just to annoy him. I drew my rapiers, but then I got a good look at the man in the lead. ‘Shit,’ I said.

Feltock and his two injured men had crossbows out, and the rest of the guards had their usual weapons. ‘What is it? Are there enough of them to take the caravan?’ the captain asked, blinking furiously as he tried to squint the hundred yards between us and them. His vision obviously wasn’t quite as good as it used to be – maybe that was why someone who had obviously been military was now reduced to guarding caravans.

‘I don’t think they’re after the caravan,’ Kest said.

‘Then what in all the hells are they after?’

The men dropped from their horses and came towards us in tight formation: thirteen men, with one in the lead.

‘Drop your weapons, Trattari, and kneel on the ground,’ the one in front ordered. He was the only one of the group wearing armour – proper armour, mind you, not the kind of patchwork greaves and mismatched plates you might find on a jumped-up sergeant. This man was a Ducal Knight, probably a Knight-captain.

Now, you might be wondering what the differences are between a Knight and a Greatcoat, since we both apparently have at least some connection to the law and fighting. Well, there’s the obvious part: they wear armour, and we wear our coats. They’re suited for war, and we’re suited for duels. Then there’s the fact that they swear their oaths to a Duke or Duchess, while we swear ours to the King’s Law – not the King himself, mind you. The Knights consider an oath to an idea to be no oath at all, and furthermore, the fact that we bow before no one in the course of our duty is, to them, an abomination. There are other differences, of course, but the most important one is that Knights are absolutely honourable and prize their honour above all things. Greatcoats, on the other hand, value justice, and tend to have a difficult time understanding how theft, rape and murder all suddenly become honourable pursuits just because a man you swore an oath to asks you to commit them.

But being a Knight meant that this man knew how to fight, knew how to lead and, given how much he was probably looking for any excuse to rid the world of us, was someone we’d do well to deal with diplomatically.

‘Fuck you, metal man,’ Brasti said casually, and let the aim of his bow slide casually towards the Knight’s chest. The Knight’s men pulled swords and three of them aimed crossbows right back at us. Those crossbows would make the odds a lot worse if we had to fight our way out. The Knight just smiled, which made him look more familiar to me somehow.

‘Feltock, what’s going on?’ the Lady called out. ‘Why haven’t you killed these bandits so that we can move on? I don’t want to lose the light.’

‘Lady Caravaner,’ the Knight-captain began, keeping wonderful composure – Knights are very good at that, much like trained cats – ‘my name is Captain Lynniac. My men and I have been sent by Isault, Duke of Aramor, to arrest and prosecute these men as the murderers of your fellow Lord Caravaner, Lord Tremondi, and to retrieve the monies they stole from him.’

‘Prosecute’ meant kill-on-the-spot-without-a-trial, in case you’re wondering. I thought Captain Lynniac looked a lot more interested in retrieving whatever money we were supposed to have stolen than he was in avenging Tremondi’s murder.

‘Well, he’ll just have to wait. I need these men to help guard my caravan,’ she said lightly. ‘After we reach Hervor, I’ll be sure to send them back, and you can prosecute them then.’

The captain didn’t appreciate her tone. ‘The Duke is sovereign in these lands, my Lady, and his orders are that these men lay down their weapons and come with us.’

‘No law makes a Duke sovereign of the roads,’ I said casually. It was one of those phrases I’d heard the Lords Caravaner use periodically, so I thought it might light a spark. ‘Furthermore, the likelihood that the Duke would pursue a crime perpetrated against Lord Tremondi – who, I should tell you, despised the Duke immensely – is about as low as the chance that you plan to let the caravan go along its merry way after you take us. What, pray tell, is the Duke’s interest in this caravan?’

‘Shut your mouth, tatter-cloak,’ the captain said, his voice tight with self-righteous fury. ‘My Lady,’ he began again, ‘it would ill suit your purposes, whatever they might be, to make an enemy of Duke Isault.’

There was a pause. I had to admit that was a very good point, and a solid counter to my legal argument that they didn’t actually have any jurisdiction over the caravan routes.

‘Very well,’ the Lady said from her carriage. ‘Trattari, you are hereby ordered to lay down your weapons.’

Well, now this was a bind. Brasti and Kest looked at me for instruction, but I wasn’t sure what the right move would be. Technically, we were the Lady’s employees. If she told us to drop our weapons, we had to drop our weapons. Also, we were trapped between the men the Duke had sent to arrest us and the caravan guards who hated us.

Captain Lynniac smiled. ‘Wise choice, my—’

‘However,’ she continued, ‘Trattari, if you go with these men and abandon this caravan, I will consider you to have breached our contract and ensure the Caravan Council knows of your failure to fulfil your contract.’

Brasti turned and stared at the closed carriage. ‘What? You’re saying we have to lay down our weapons but not get arrested? What are we supposed to do – fight them barehanded?’

‘My Lady is wise and just,’ Captain Lynniac said.

‘Of course, any of my men who wish to assist my tatter-cloaks are welcome to do so,’ she said, as if in passing.

Captain Lynniac’s eyes darted to the rest of the caravan guards, but not one of them made a move. That just made him smile more. He really did look familiar when he did that. Where had I seen that smile?

‘Well, boy,’ Feltock whispered in my ear, ‘there’s a lesson in here somewhere. Can’t tell you what it is, but I’m sure you’ll figure it out eventually.’

The captain’s men laughed. Brasti looked confused. I tried desperately to think of a way out of this, and Kest just smiled, which only made things worse.

‘Kest,’ I said slowly, ‘considering we are the very definition of damned if we do and damned if we don’t, would you mind telling me why in the name of Saint Felsan-who-weighs-the-world you’re smiling?’

‘Because,’ he said, dropping his sword to the ground and unrolling the bottom of his coat sleeves, ‘now we get to play cuffs.’

You have to understand how the sleeves of a greatcoat are constructed. The leather of the sleeve is itself quite formidable and can save you from a lot of damage. Oh, you could pierce it with an arrow if you get enough force behind it, but even a fairly sharp blade won’t cut into it. But the cuffs at the end of the sleeve, those are something different. They contain two carefully carved bone pieces sewn into the leather itself. They can take a hit from just about anything – Kest believes that they could even block the ball from a pistol, but we haven’t yet had occasion to test his theory.

There are occasions in the course of a travelling Magister’s duties where he or she might not be able to draw a weapon, either because the physical space is too tight or because, for one reason or another, you don’t actually want to carve up the person who is attacking you. For these situations, the King demanded that we be able to defend ourselves even if we were weaponless. So you unfold the cuffs of your coat and loop the leather strap attached to them to your two middle fingers. You now have a way of parrying swords, maces or other weapons that might otherwise do you harm. That is, of course, if you move really, really fast and don’t miss any of your blocks.

When we practised fighting like this, which, thank Saint Gan-who-laughs-with-dice, we did a lot in the old days, we called it ‘playing cuffs’.

‘This isn’t going to work, you know,’ I said to Kest as I flipped my cuffs over and pushed my fingers through the leather loops. ‘They’re going to get smart and use those crossbows to pick us off at a distance.’

‘You’ll figure something out,’ he replied.

‘Figure it out soon,’ Brasti said. He was probably the best bowman in the civilised world, but he rarely won at cuffs. I was pretty good at it. Using rapiers as your primary weapon, you have to learn precision, and I was never much good with a shield, so cuffs wasn’t a bad alternative.

But being good at cuffs wasn’t a strategy. The first part would be easy enough – get them to fight us up close so that their friends with the crossbows couldn’t get a clear shot. Even if we could hold them off, though, this Knight and his men would soon get tired of being made to look bad. If they couldn’t get us with swords, eventually they’d just pull back and let the crossbowmen do the job. If only our ‘comrades’ in the caravan guard had been better disposed towards us and kept their own crossbows on our opponents, we’d have stood a better chance. Unfortunately, just then they were rooting for the other guys.

‘Is there a plan?’ Brasti asked, looking at me. ‘Because if there’s a plan, then I’d love to know what it is, and if there’s not and I get killed going hand-to-sword with a bunch of Duke’s men, then I may start to lose respect for you, Falcio.’

I did have a plan. It might have sounded like a terrible plan at first hearing, but it really was not as bad as all that …

‘Sir Knight, before we begin, may I say something?’ I called out.

‘Last words? Remarkably prescient for a dog.’

‘I just wanted to say that all Dukes are traitors, all Knights are liars, and the road belongs to no one but the caravans.’

Captain Lynniac growled, and he and his men charged us.

Brasti said, ‘Please tell me that wasn’t the entire plan?’

‘Stop talking,’ I said, beating the first blade out of the way as they came upon us like a thunderstorm, ‘and start singing.’

I took Lynniac’s blade on my right cuff, using a tight circle to beat it out of the way as I sidestepped to my left. The secret to playing cuffs is that you have to pair every parry or sweep with a complementary movement of the feet, otherwise you’re likely to end up with broken hands and wrists from the force of the blows.

The first man behind Lynniac tried a thrust to my midsection while the Knight himself tried to get his blade back in the air for a down-stroke. I slid back to the right and let the thrust go right by me and kicked Lynniac in the chest before he could ready the blow. In my periphery, Brasti was using both hands in a downwards block to counter a thrust from a war-sword. I could already hear Kest in my mind chastising Brasti for poor technique: you never want to use both hands to block a single weapon as it leaves you vulnerable to the next man. I didn’t bother checking on Kest because – well, he’s Kest and that would just depress me. Instead I started the song, which, after all, was the core of my plan.

The last line coincided nicely with my backhanding one of the soldiers in the jaw as his mace missed my shoulder in a failed down-stroke. Unfortunately, no one joined me on the chorus.

Kest and Brasti picked up the second verse with me. All Greatcoats learn to sing. In smaller towns and villages you often had to pass judgement by singing the verdict so that it would be easier for the townsfolk to remember. Brasti’s voice was a classic baritone, well-suited to songs like this one. Kest’s voice would surprise you if you heard it – it was smooth and sweet and completely out of character. But their voices weren’t the ones I needed.

One of the men with the crossbows tried to get a shot in, but I’d been waiting for just such an occasion. I was pushing off one man while another was trying to brain me with his mace, but that gave him a heavy-footed stance and by side-stepping the blow, I got on the other side of him in time for the crossbow bolt to take him square in the chest. I was starting to get a little winded, so I was glad that Kest and Brasti were holding up their end of the singing now.

I let the dying man who’d been my shield slide down to the ground, only to see another soldier with a crossbow raising it towards me. I took a step to the right and raised my arms up to cover my face.

The crossbow bolt narrowly missed me, but, fortunately, it didn’t miss the man who had worked his way behind me. I suspected that Captain Lynniac would be having a severe talk with his bowmen after this fight. Even better was the fact that I thought I might have heard someone from the caravan sing that last line with us.

But our time was running out. We’d taken out half of them, but that just left more openings for the crossbows. Brasti had some blood on his temple where he’d taken a glancing blow. Kest was doing all right holding off two men, but he was getting dangerously open, and if one of the men with crossbows saw the chance … To make things worse, the ground beneath our feet was turning into mud and muck and it wouldn’t be long before one of us slipped or tripped over another man’s body. And worst of all, we were running out of verses to the damned song.

I took down the man in front of me with a kick to his knee, followed by a strike to the side of his head. I saw Kest had taken both his men down, but Brasti was struggling, swinging wildly to block the blows of the swordsman in front of him. He wasn’t singing any more.

Captain Lynniac was stepping back from the fray and shouting to his men. Two of the men with crossbows were reloading, but the third was taking aim.

At his shout the rest of the Knight’s men pulled back and I saw Brasti looking around frantically for an opponent and not seeing the crossbow aimed squarely at his chest not twenty feet away. I tried to push past my own last men in a futile effort to get there in time. I could see Kest, not moving, his overly practical nature telling him there was no point. Brasti’s head turned and saw the crossbow too late. His hands started to move reflexively to guard his face when a bolt appeared in the throat of the Knight’s bowman.

There was a second of dead silence, and no one moved. Then I turned my head and looked behind me at a man in one of our wagons holding an empty crossbow. It was Blondie. ‘But my brother is the man who guards my caravan,’ he sang softly.

And that, I thought, is the old saying: ‘The song is swifter than the sword.’

I turned back to the fight. Most of the captain’s men were on the ground now. Two were still standing, but they were wary, and edging back. Lynniac himself was looking straight at me as he raised his right arm up in line with my gut. He had taken the cocked crossbow from his dead man. Knights don’t normally use bows – they consider them coward’s weapons. And knives are good enough for a soldier’s need, perhaps, but not good enough for a Knight’s honour. In my entire life I’d never seen a Knight who would even touch a crossbow. But Lynniac had lost a fight, and a Knight’s sense of honour could not forgive that. He had watched his men beaten by outlaws he considered less than dogs, and without weapons. And apparently he had no more use for honour and he was going to put a bolt into me out of pure spite. He gave me something that was a cross between a snarl and a smile, and again that sense of familiarity flared.

Then he started to laugh, and suddenly made himself known to me.

I remembered that laugh. At first it was just the soft touch of a sour memory, but it quickly filled up my world until I couldn’t really see Captain Lynniac, and I didn’t see if the sword, which I had just grabbed off the ground and thrown at him like an amateur, had hit him or missed entirely, because all I could see were the five hundred Knights who’d come to Castle Aramor to depose King Paelis and outlaw the Greatcoats. I couldn’t tell if the bolt that he had loosed had lightly grazed the side of my neck or if it was jammed in my throat because all I could feel was the heat emanating from the burned wreckage of the King’s library – the hundred ashen corpses of the texts that had meant so much to him. I couldn’t tell if Kest’s and Brasti’s shouts were encouragement or warning me that someone else was behind me, because all I could hear was the laughter of the Ducal Knights as my King’s head was jammed onto a pole and hoisted up atop Castle Aramor’s parapet. That laugh. As impossible as it seemed, Captain Lynniac’s laugh was how I remembered him, and it was both the reason and the means for me to put him out of this world.

I can’t explain what happened to me except to say that my anger gave way to a recklessness that felt like a soft, grey place of infinite indifference. The first time it had happened to me had been years ago, before I’d met the King, but there had been other incidents since then, and they came closer together now. Coming out of it was getting harder and harder too. That was why I was grateful, in a distant and uninterested way, when Kest struck me down with the pommel of one of the fallen soldier’s swords.