darkened blade_ A fallen blade novel - Kelly McCullough Page 0,30

me back and back again with sheer raw power.

It was daunting. Doubly so since I knew that he could shift styles in a heartbeat, moving from force to finesse with ease. He had done so all the time back in the days when he taught me to use my swords—mirroring the styles of a dozen of the order’s most dangerous foes in aid of teaching us to defeat them. Through him, my childhood self had lost fights with the Elite, the Dyads, the Hairi . . . And, dammit, there he was again, beating me in my head instead of on the field.

He had backed me to the very edge of our impromptu ring, though I’d kept him from pinning me in the corner. I was in danger of letting him push me right into the river if I didn’t do something quickly. By sliding sharply to my left and at the cost of two points—one to my wrist, another on my shoulder—I managed to get around Kelos and shift back toward the center of the ring. It might not be in my head, but he was still beating me, and maybe he always would.

Kelos scored a third point then, knocking my right-hand sword aside with another smashing cut followed by a reversal of his blade to slap my hip with the flat, and that was the match.

“Again?” asked Kelos.

I wanted so very much to say no, to plead exhaustion and slither away to lick my wounds, though I was far more injured in spirit than flesh. It would have been the easy thing to do, the smart thing, even. But I refused to give up. I won’t say that I couldn’t have walked away, because I could have. I just wouldn’t.

“Again,” I said.

He switched styles now, shifting from hack and slash, to flit and flick, dancing his edges around me in swift and shimmering network that let him prick two points off me in less than a minute. He was so very good. But, dammit, so was I. I would not let him do this to me.

Kelos came in for the third point, but I deflected him. Barely. And again. And yet again. I was fighting him off, but only by pushing myself to the very top of my form, and only for a time. He really was better than me, and not just in my head. For some reason it was far harder to admit that than it had ever been to admit that Siri was.

So, I couldn’t win. Accept that, move on. Maybe I could still at least score a point if I waited for the right opportunity. My tactics stayed much the same—Kelos had kept me on the defensive from our first moment of engagement—but my attitude shifted. Instead of fighting a sense of defeat as well as Kelos, I embraced it. I was going to lose. The best I could do was lose with style.

I saw an opening that I wouldn’t have tried for before—too risky, too little chance of scoring a point. This time, I went for it hard. I missed, but Kelos had to actually hop back to keep my edge away from his skin. I had surprised him, and he grinned. He likes surprises. Another minute went by with me somehow managing to keep him from scoring that final point. I saw a second opening—low, and riskier even than the last. If I missed, Kelos couldn’t help but finish me off.

Why not?

I started a lunge at Kelos’s chest, but at the last moment I let my forward leg collapse, dropping my whole body toward the floor. I released my left-hand sword and caught myself on the palm of that hand. My thrusting hand shifted with me as I fell, angling up now at the meaty part of Kelos’s thigh rather than straight into his chest, just as I had planned.

My point went home, sinking a good inch into his leg before I had the presence of mind to stop my thrust, so unexpected was my success. We both froze then, him standing, me balanced precariously on knee and toes and palm. A trickle of blood ran down half the length of my blade before meeting the edge and dripping to the deck in a series of bright drops.

I didn’t know what to do or say. In all the years I’d known Kelos, and all the times I’d sparred with him, I had never once needed to pull a blow before. Even in