The TwiceBorn

Slowing Down For The Silence

"Where's my enduring patience? It should have arrived by now..."--Katie Reider 

A flash of lightning almost blinded Alora . The intensity of it flashed across the grasses.  Dimly, she heard the explosion of a tree off in the woods.  Aubery yelped, a wild cur-like peal, and charged her with his blade waving over his head.

 And Alora smiled.

The weight of her own sword was like stone and she’d been frightened by how unfamiliar and awkward it felt.  She was near the end of her strength. She wasn’t up for a test of blades. The boy though, was exactly as he appeared to be; ungainly and clumsy and she had a brief moment of wondering why Behrin would put this kid on her trail.

Islinn had said Behrin was going mad. 

Alora deflected his sword easily and swung her own blade low to take out his legs.  She sliced through empty air.  The boy danced nimbly out of the way and swung a savage arc, driving Alora to her left.  Her eyes narrowed and she readjusted her grip on the slippery hilt of her sword.

He was quicker than he looked.  Alora had a flash of her odd intuition, borne of nothing yet simply there.  There was a purpose to this boy’s sending.  Behrin’s strange patchwork mind wasn’t as addled as she’d first thought.

Rain ran in her eyes and she brushed back her sodden hair with a quick hand.  The thunder and lightning walked and talked all around them now and Alora noticed the boy jumped a bit at every loud roar.

He only thought the thunder was frightening.  She would show him true fear.

He circled her, hunched over, with his sword poked out in front of him and his other hand tight against his body.  He was trying to make himself as small as possible, Alora noted.  More of a thief’s stance than a swordsman.

It didn’t matter.  Her blade would find its way home soon enough.

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    It was playing out just as Gre expected it to and the arrival of his own death was momentarily forgotten as he sat back, ale in hand.  What was about to occur was something he’d wanted ever since Aubery had started to trail behind Behrin like an abandoned gutter pup.

It was everything he’d imagined it to be.

He took another pull from his aleskin and watched as Aubery danced about, and wasted energy, while the Twiceborn calmly waited for her chance.  Which would come, Gre had no doubt.  Even though she didn’t appear to be as fast with a blade as all the stories he’d heard. Of course, it was difficult to dazzle with a blade in a storm like the one going on overhead.

He glanced at Islinn.  She had stilled, her eyes riveted on the battle and she appeared to be unaware of the wind and rain.  All the color from her face was gone, as though the pounding raindrops had washed it away and Gre felt an odd twinge in his heart at her expression.  No girl would ever look at him like that in this lifetime.  It had never bothered him before. Now he drunkenly wondered what all he had missed. 

Of course, not much sense in regretting it now, it was all going to pass soon enough.

Gre raised the skin up to his mouth and focused on Aubery and the Twiceborn out on the grasslands. She was  merely playing with the boy.  Aubery swung and dodged and parried and stabbed, always dancing and sliding through the mud and The Twiceborn met each challenge handily, slowly but surely, wearing him down.

A slow smile surfaced on Gre’s face.  The Twiceborn didn’t simply want to kill the boy; she wanted him exhausted first.  She wanted him miserable and unable to lift the heavy sword with his scrawny little arms.  She didn’t want to just kill him and be done.  She wanted to beat him first. He took another long drink.