Reckless (Age of Conquest #5) - Tamara Leigh Page 0,124
nothing more, whereas Daryl and he were the spectacle, and that was everything in this contest between life and death.
Vitalis ran again, this time at the back of his opponent who was slow to correct his course. As he neared, Daryl came around, but not soon enough to get his blade fully aloft. That required a leap backward.
It could have been an attempt to sow overconfidence to render Vitalis vulnerable, but he did not believe it. The youth he had trained at Wulfen was in Daryl’s eyes. Though brief that glimpse, it was the same anger and desperation that could not be trained out of him—that which made him wield arms less by a warrior’s strength and strategy than a coward’s cunning, trickery, and evasion.
As Vitalis continued his advance, he guessed from the placement of his opponent’s back leg, the slight turn of his body, and the angling of his sword that his next swing would be backhanded.
It was, and Vitalis knew exactly where to slam the edge of his blade to knock it aside.
Daryl’s sidestep and counter swing was impressive, displacing the air near Vitalis’s neck.
“Ho!” the traitor cried and readied for their next meeting. “You are certain you do not wish to trade that useless dagger for armor? Do you not, it could prove difficult for Lady Nicola to identify your body.”
Daryl and his bravado, Vitalis thought and answered with his sword.
The traitor’s one achievement having strengthened his confidence, he proceeded to prove the training completed by his sire and a renowned mercenary was impressive. Around the battleground they fought, one bettering the other, next the other bettering the one. But whereas Daryl took blood mostly by scoring the skin of his opponent’s unarmored body, Vitalis sank his blade deeper in the flesh of forearms, calves, and a shoulder exposed by gapped chain mail. Also of note was the strength of breath expressing each one’s pain. Though Vitalis mostly grunted and growled, Daryl muffled wheezing gasps and cries.
Before a quarter hour passed beneath a sun taking more perspiration from Vitalis than Daryl took blood, Vitalis knew with certainty if he drew a full bucket from the deep of the warrior’s well rather than the half buckets thus far drawn, he could end the contest. And he was tempted since it would provide Nicola relief where she stood between William and Richard, her face pale.
But he was no longer entirely at Red Castle. Time and again he slipped away to the stable near the river and felt the burn of tears as he was forced to choose between the woman he was coming to feel much for and his dying friend who would pass from this world surrounded by vicious enemies, never knowing a prize would be made of his head.
Thus, Vitalis continued to play with his prey outside the castle’s walls, and when the weight of chain mail and sword began to wear upon his enemy, links glistening with perspiration, lazily he deflected Daryl’s swings amid the encouragement of Normans who approved of what had become a game.
A game, Vitalis’s conscience sought to dump the checkered board and its pieces, and perhaps it would have had not Daryl begun using his labored breath to taunt his opponent, whether to rouse anger that would cause Vitalis to make a critical mistake, or because he realized death would be better now than after he was reduced to a sobbing boy inside a man’s body.
“Your friend, Zedekiah! Oh, the expression on that ugly face looking out over Peterborough. That is, whilst he had eyes.” He slammed his sword against Vitalis’s that had more swing behind it than moments earlier. “Pitiful, but understandable since he was pleading for God’s mercy when his head came off.”
Truth or not, they are only words, Vitalis told himself as he ducked Daryl’s next swing, snapped upright, and drove his left elbow into the man’s ear.
Daryl howled, jumped back, and swung wildly toward his opponent’s next blow.
“That I did not teach you, whelp,” Vitalis shouted. “This I taught you.” He swept up his sword, and as his perspiration misted the air, slid the blade over Daryl’s nearly to the tip, and locked it there as his opponent strained to push it off. Then he swept the D’Argent dagger from his belt and set its edge against the younger man’s neck at the place where Zedekiah’s murderer would have begun the desecration of his body.
“Rather, this I tried to teach you, Daryl, son of Aiken.”