Wicked Bronze Ambition

20

Singe yelled, “Look out!” I looked up, found a pretty, dark-haired girl hurtling toward me, growling.

Penny squealed. The flying girl smashed into me. She hammered my chest with her fists. “Hate you! Hate you!”

Father Amerigo stopped talking. Everyone else gawked, including people you would expect to respond quickly and harshly, considering the event that had us gathered in a cemetery. Morley, Singe, and General Block were the exceptions. Block pulled Penny to her feet. She had done an inelegant sprawl on the wet grass. She was fortunate. She had chosen to wear underwear on her dress-up day.

Still, her dignity had been abused. She would be sullen for a long time.

Morley and Singe peeled the girl off me. She looked maybe fourteen, fifteen, but only eleven or twelve tall. She eyed me like she wasn’t sure what she’d just done, or why she had done it.

Her face was one of the most beautiful I’d ever seen, though she was more pale than ever-pallid Strafa even in death. Her hair was fine, black, and hung in an odd, floppy cut on the sides. Her head, even discounting her unusual hairdo, seemed too big for her shoulders.

Maybe her shoulders were too narrow for her head.

Her clothing allowed no real estimate of the balance of her. It was black and white and there was a lot of it.

She shook off Morley and Singe, glared at me from eyes filled with tears. “Hate you!” Then she ran back uphill, to the dogs. Those followed her once she dashed past.

General Block passed Penny to me. He had, somehow, managed to winkle a nonsullen smile out of the girl.

Somebody asked the question. “What the hell was that, Garrett?”

Singe said, “She looked like a little milk cow.” She eyed Penny. “Someone you know?”

Head shake.

Everyone eyeballed me. I insisted, “I don’t know. I never saw her before.”

They gave me the benefit of the doubt. Family. Especially after some wit tapped the truth to mention that I had been much too tied up with my wife to make any outside friends and, anyway, Little Moo was a good month or two younger than my usual pickup.

He got a few feeble smiles, but, overall, it was not a day for any humor but the foul.

Shadowslinger, I noted, kept staring uphill for some time after the girl disappeared. I wanted to drift over and ask about that, but there was no time. The rain kept falling. The cold kept on trying to gnaw the marrow out of our bones. I would have to ask her later. I would not be getting far away from her for a while now.

Folks wanted to get back to the matter at hand. They wanted to get in out of the misery.

Implausible interruption concluded, the effort to exorcise the pain of the survivors resumed. Father droned his litany of reasons why we all found Strafa so remarkable. Those were plentiful and heartfelt. I shed tears because my friends had found her as amazing as I had.

Father Amerigo finished up. Time for us pallbearers to convey Strafa into the crypt. There were only four of us, but Strafa had been a wisp and her casket was lightweight. We moved it, placed it. I stared down at her, willing time to have a stop, till Barate took me away, back into the rain, so half-drowned, impatient old men could seal the tomb.

I cried some more. So did everyone else who could. Only Penny had failed to love Strafa unreservedly, but even she had been coming around and now was determined to show the rest of us how thoroughly she had changed her heart.

Strafa Algarda was the love of my life. My heart and soul. She could not have been more perfect had I designed her. Now those of us still in the mortal realm would find out why someone had thought that it would be better for the world if she left it.

I was not fully prepared to buy into the Tournament of Swords idea. It was ridiculous. The Algardas, though, had no trouble believing. But the notion of a last man standing takes all was just too stupid. . How would you come up with that many players all convinced that there was no way they could lose?

All mysteries would be unraveled. This gathering in the rain consisted of people who loved Strafa and, universally, were convinced that the truth would be found. They were determined to make that happen.