“Darek!” Alea said, her trained vocal magic slipping into a multi-layered swirl of venomous tones, a hiss and a crackle wrapping around her own beautiful voice like a pair of striking serpents. “What in the light are you doing here?”
“Paying for fruit… if you can believe how far I’ve been flung that things have come to that,” he replied, hefting his basket. “Did you think you’d ever live to see such a thing? Well, I suppose if you didn’t, it looks as though you were almost right.”
The house soldiers looked around each other, bemused… unsure whether the newcomer was here to aid their enemy or not.
“Have I not suffered enough in your eyes?” Alea said, spitting the words out in an uncontrolled dissonant tumble. “Must you humiliate me further?”
“Maybe just a little,” Darek said, and he set his basket of apples down and stepped forward.
The soldiers split into two groups… four of them with their spears on the unarmed and unhoused priestess, and four of them turning to address Darek. The two males who faced him stepped forward to meet his advance.
“Please step back, Lieutenant of House d’Wyr,” one of them said, using the most courteous inflection for the title they gleaned from his cloak insignia and the house that was apparent in its design… a spiraling tartan-like pattern of shades of black and subtle purples, the exact form of which was particular to his house. “You are interfering with a lawful and reasoned action.”
“Darek, you will embarrass the house,” Alea said.
“It’s not your house to worry about,” Darek reminded her.
“It’s not yours to embarrass, either!” she said.
“Gentles, I believe you are about to make a terrible mistake,” Darek said, continuing forward. Four spears were leveled at his chest, their tips crackling with dark auras.
“If you have anything to say on the subject, you may say it from a respectful distance,” the other male said.
“Very well, very well,” Darek said, raising his sword along with both arms and stepping back. He continued until he was two feet behind where he’d set the basket down and asked, “Is this sufficient?”
The males looked at each other, and then nodded.
“Make your case,” one of them said, and the words had not yet died on his lips when Darek whipped his arm forward, throwing his sword point-first through that soldier’s stomach and into the female behind him. He ducked forward underneath the energy blasts of the three soldiers who were not stunned into inaction.
With a kick, he sent the basket of apples at the head of the nearest standing soldier, the other male who’d addressed him, and then ran forward to pull his sword from the two impaled elves, who didn’t fall to the ground until then.
One on six, then, but they were common soldiers, and he fended off their spears, dancing around in too close among them for them to blast him. The most they could do on him were some glancing hits with the sides of their spears, which his cloak took the brunt of as he kept moving.
He recognized the eightfold flame symbol as belonging to House Eyru, a relatively minor one. If they raised a whole clutch of halfkind and let them wander out into the market with only an octet of guards to protect all of them, they were lucky if being kicked in the jewels was the worst thing that happened to their living jewelry.
Then he heard the commotion circling all around them, and he realized the mistake he’d made: it wasn’t eight guards for all, but for one… the eight he’d engaged with had been responding to an insulting but non-life-threatening assault on their particular charge. Now that there was open battle, the others were coming to join.
He looked up to see easily another three octets, each with a shrieking halfkind clutching at cer veil behind them.
A minor skirmish was one thing, and could be woven any number of ways in order to be excused, but a battle of this scale was another thing altogether.
Alea had been right… he was going to embarrass the house.
Or die trying.
He raised his sword. Spears came down.
“Wait!” Alea yelled, her trained voice seeming to cut through his skull. Everybody halted in their tracks. “Please,” she said respectfully, “allow me to tend to the wounded.” She had knelt down beside the two elves felled by Darek’s throw. “I would not have anybody but myself slain for my actions.”
“The lieutenant assaulted us,” one of the women said. “Do you think we will let that pass?”
“That was his action, not mine,” Alea said.
“I saw a woman being threatened with consequences out of proportion with her actions,” Darek said. He took note of the discreet attention they were gaining… the market crowd had pulled back, but activity had slowed around them. People were watching. People were listening. “Rude as she may have been, is half a woman now so much more valuable than a whole one that cer bruised, ah, ego is worth a life?”
The original soldiers looked at each other. A female nodded to a male.
“Life? Nobody said anything about the lady’s life,” he said to Darek. “We only meant to stop the assault.”
“And stop it you have,” Darek said. He gestured to Alea, who had stabilized the much worse injuries of the male and was now seeing to the female. “Now, the lady is caring for your injured, so it seems as though there is nothing left to be done.”
The other halfkinds, who had their assets bound in iron bands, in chains, and in an extremely exotic frame of wood imported from the sun-blasted lands above, were clucking and exclaiming over their fallen sibling in the language the halves had invented for themselves and taught to no one else.
Darek, however, had spent enough time in the company of Dehsah to understand bits of it… the elf was declaring cerself better than any houseless vermin, whether they were full woman or not.
“Would you like to repeat that for everybody to hear?” he asked cer.
“Wicked Dylie!” said one of cer friends, wearing a tight-laced corset with wood panels and carved wooden half-cups pushing up cer breasts. The garment was so tight Darek was amazed the elf could breathe. Other than the dangling ends of a see-through shawl that ce wore more like a stole, ce seemed to be wearing nothing to speak of below the waist. “You should be careful when you speak. That is Derak, the chief lover of the d’Wyri’s black diamond.”
Well, ce had gotten his name wrong and also missed in guessing Dehsah’s main lover… Darek’s experience was that halfkind, being created from male children, tended to value attachments to men more… but ce knew who he was, and the description was enough to throw ripples of recognition throughout the soldiers. There went the last miniscule chance that word of this would not travel far and wide and follow him back to the house, but on the other hand, the soldiers seemed less certain.
The cavern of Darek’s fortunes had been enlarged considerably lately. He was not just a lieutenant of a house guard of a powerful house, he was a preferred mating male and the male lover of a potential matriarch. He was on his way to greater ranks. It would be inexpedient to kill him and dangerous to leave him alive as an enemy.
“The insult must be answered,” an Eyru female, wearing the hourglass captain symbol on her cloak announced. “As wicked Dylie is a halfkind who stands insulted by a woman, the man who stands for Alea will pay the balance.”
Darek pushed back his cowl so he could give the sobbing halfkind his most charming, disarming smile.
“Would you like some apples, by chance?” he suggested as cer friends walked cer over to him, but ce ignored the attempt at restitution and opted for in-kind payment.
By the time he’d recovered his breath, the Eyrui had departed and most of his scattered apples had walked away, as well.
“What are you doing buying apples in the market, anyway?” Alea asked, handing him his basket.
“It’s a long story,” Darek said. “But suffice it to say, I won’t be paying any unauthorized visits to the island any time soon, thanks to pretty Dehsah.”
“Cer greedy little fingers finally grasped more than they could hold?” Alea asked.
“For your information, ce never asked me to steal fruit,” Darek said. “I did it because it was challenging and it was fun, and the end results made cer happy.”
“Which made Dee happy,” Alea said. “Which made you happy.”
“What’s wrong with making everybody happy?” Darek asked. “And you’re welcome, by the way.”
“Oh, no, you’re delirious,” she said.
“I must be, if I expected gratitude from you, of all people,” he said. “You never did know how to show proper appreciation, even to the woman who took you in.”
“You make me sound like a charity case,” she said.
“You were a charity case,” he said. “Dee was being charitable. She’s just too charitable a spirit to realize it… and then you hold it against her that she’s oblivious to the differences in your stations.”
“A person of her station can afford to be insensate to such things, but I never could,” Alea said. “All I wanted was some acknowledgement of that.”
“Being loved wasn’t enough?” Darek asked.
“Don’t talk to me about love,” she said, turning away from him. She spotted an apple that hadn’t been carried off and bent to retrieve it.
“You’ve felt what I feel when we… the four of us… were together,” Darek said. “Don’t tell me I don’t love Dee. I love her power and I love the opportunities she opens up, to be certain… but even if that’s part of what I love about her, is it not still love?”
“I felt your passion,” Alea said. “I’m not sure you know what love is.”
“What do you love about her?” Darek asked.
“I love her,” Alea said. “Her as a person. All of her.”
“Except for the parts you don’t, the parts that were enough to make you leave.”
“She left me..”
“She left Durakesh,” Darek said. “So selfish, to think it was about you!”
“Don’t think you can be so familiar with me, Lieutenant Darek,” Alea said. “We may have been lovers by association once, but I am still a female and a priestess and you are still a male.”
“I am still a lieutenant of a house guard and you are still houseless and chapeless,” Darek said. “But I do love Dee, and I know she loves you more than you deserve, so not only will I not deign to respond to your insults as the insecure Eyrui did, I will do better: I’m going to make it my personal business to ensure you are alive to apologize when she returns.”
