rueful grin that promptly disappeared when Vaelin slapped the flat of his sword against the side of the youth’s head.
“A fight doesn’t end when you lose your weapon,” he said, drawing the ash blade back for a second blow. Sehmon reacted swiftly, dipping into a forward roll that brought his hand in range of his fallen sword. He snatched it up in time to deflect the thrust Vaelin jabbed at his midriff.
“You seem to think this a game, Master Sehmon,” Vaelin said, advancing on the now-back-pedalling outlaw. “I assure you it is not.”
Sehmon leapt as Vaelin slashed at his legs, landing atop the starboard rail, then leapt again to avoid another blow that would have sent him into the sea. He caught hold of some rigging and swung, bringing his body round in a wide arc to deliver a two-footed kick to Vaelin’s hip. He managed to keep his feet but the force of the impact sent him to his knees.
Three ways, he thought as Sehmon landed close by. Three ways in which a skilled adversary could kill me now. Unfortunately for Sehmon, he chose the wrong way. His sword came down in a hefty vertical swing that thudded into the deck as Vaelin moved his head aside. Sehmon let out a groan of mingled pain and defeat as Vaelin’s lunge took him in the belly, leaving him gasping on the deck on all fours.
“Deep breaths,” Vaelin told the youth. “Remember, a kneeling man turns slower than a standing man. Best to come at him from the side.”
Sehmon fought down a retch. “My thanks for the lesson, my lord.”
Helping the outlaw to his feet, Vaelin heard Alum let out a low chuckle. “The dance of the long blades, my people called it,” he said, smiling at them from his perch atop a dense coil of rope. “We always found the attachment of others to such things strange. This,” he said, reaching for the spear propped close by, “is all a man needs in a fight, or a hunt. Here.” He tossed the spear to Sehmon. “Put that twig down and learn the true art of combat.”
Sehmon cast a questioning glance at Vaelin. “Your master’s commands take precedence in this,” he said, moving aside.
He spent an hour or so watching Alum tutor his servant in the basics of the spear, gaining a true appreciation for the Moreska’s skills in the process. He had already assessed him as a skilled hunter with the strength and resolve to kill a man with only a set of chains. Now, seeing the fluid economy of his movements and the way the spear blurred and seemed to change shape in his hands, he was forced to judge Alum as a man he hoped he would never have to fight. It raised the question of how it had been possible for him to be captured.
I was captured once, he reminded himself. The notion inevitably led to reminiscences about his time in the Emperor’s dungeons, and the visions of Sherin brought to him by the blood-song. They had just been brief glimpses at first, growing in detail and duration as he honed his ability with the song. Always he saw her healing; a sailor with a broken arm, a sickly child in a hovel, a woman in an opulent mansion suffering through a difficult birth. In time the glimpses began to fade as he felt her drawing beyond his reach, but the final vision remained clearest of all. She had been happy, he remembered, recalling the deep regard of the man she had been greeting. Who is he? Friend? Lover? Husband?
A loud commotion from belowdecks broke through his rumination, Alum and Sehmon’s practice coming to a halt at the volume of the disturbance.
“It’ll just be a brawl, my lord,” Sehmon said as a chorus of upraised voices continued to emerge from a nearby hatchway. “Never met a sailor that couldn’t find something to fight about.”
The babble of conflict seemed louder than any mere brawl and, as it continued, Vaelin detected an odd note, one voice pitched higher than the others. A female voice.
Muttering a curse, he ran for the hatchway and quickly scaled the ladder into the hold. The source of the commotion wasn’t hard to find, a dense knot of men near the stern, repeatedly closing on and then retreating from something in their midst. One of them reared back with a shout of pain, Vaelin glimpsing blood on his face. The other sailors, six in all,