TRHK Chapter 16

He was already smiling while very clearly pretending not to. He looked, on the whole, like a man who was having a fine time.

"Heavily drunk, by the look of it. Well—do fight well!"

Joel regarded him with cold eyes and withdrew.

The knights waiting to face Kahron had already arranged themselves on the opposite side, prepared to go one at a time. The knight who had bothered Maylin was last in the queue. Ordered by size, she thought, surveying the others. A strategy for wearing Kahron down. The deliberateness made her feel additionally annoyed.

"Heard you've been drinking? Don't worry—so have I."

The first knight drew his broadsword and smiled with the comfortable ease of someone who had already decided how this would end. It was the widest blade Maylin had seen in this world.

Five against one, she thought sourly, and making jokes about it.

Kahron—still smiling—drew his own sword in answer. It should have been an ordinary sound, pulling steel from a scabbard. Shhriiiing. It didn't sound ordinary. The knight's easy smile went stiff at the edges.

"Insolent bastard. Today I'm going to educate you!"

Hup!—a battle cry, and the knight charged, closing the distance in an instant, blade sweeping horizontal.

Kahron wasn't there.

He was in the air. He'd vaulted the swing cleanly, weighted his descent, and came down on the knight like a problem arriving from above. The knight scrambled to raise the broadsword in time—

Clang! Claang!

He blocked it. He also slid back thirty paces.

Clang! Kaang!

"Wait—just wait a moment—ugh!"

Kahron gave him nothing. He was less merciful than he'd been against the forest monsters, hammering through every signal to pause, battering at the broadsword as though intending to break it.

Kaang!

"Hk!"

Then he did break it. The blade snapped off and spun across the room—toward Joel's side, of all possible directions. Several people dove.

"Lord Joel! Are you all right?"

"Fine. Continue."

The blade had missed him. Unfortunate.

Kaang!

"I surrender! I surrender!"

With nothing but a hilt and a jagged stump remaining, the first knight had apparently decided he preferred to live, and threw both hands up. Kahron kept attacking. The knight waved more desperately. Kahron lowered his sword.

"Already? That was a short lesson. Hard to tell which of us was being educated."

There were no words for how a face like that could be that insufferably cheerful while saying things like that. The defeated knight was trembling—humiliation and fury competing for space—but there was nothing left to fight with. A replacement sword wouldn't have changed the outcome.

"Kahron wins!"

"Hooray!"

Applause from the spectators. Maylin had been watching so intently her eyes had dried out, and she clapped without thinking, following the crowd. The whole thing had ended before her palms could sweat. There was something quietly disquieting about how effortless it had looked.

The second knight stepped forward with the expression of a man going somewhere he did not want to go. He was on the ground before long.

The third. The fourth.

By the time four consecutive fights had concluded—all of them one-sided—the crowd's initial enthusiasm had curdled into something flatter. The most interesting faces in the room were Joel's and the fifth knight's: one white with fury, the other white with fear.

"I—he's already fought four of us. There's no real need for me to—"

Pushed toward the center of the training grounds, the fifth knight was still arguing the case for his own absence when Joel's expression landed on him. He stopped.

Joel looked like a man who might breathe fire.

The knight made the kind of decision made when no good options remain. He ran at Kahron with everything he had—and it was fast, fast enough that Maylin, who had no real expertise to judge by, thought it might actually give him trouble. He was quicker than the others.

Kahron's sword caught the attack and deflected it without apparent effort.

Then it cut through empty air.

At first she thought he'd swung wide by mistake—that he'd missed.

Then she heard the scream. Then she saw the floor.

The knight's arm—severed cleanly below the elbow—lay on the training ground.

"AAAH! My arm—my arm!"

The crowd's sound was collective and involuntary. Hands flew to mouths. People who might have screamed, who did not only because the knight was already doing it for all of them.

Landale crossed the room quickly, assessed the knight, and looked at the Count.

"He needs the temple immediately, my lord. To have the arm reattached."

"Take him."

Several knights gathered up both the man and his severed arm and ran.

The knight who had been cheerfully announcing victories after each match went quiet, watching the Count and Countess carefully. The blood spreading across the training ground floor looked like a scene from somewhere nothing good had occurred. Hwirozen exhaled.

"That insane bastard..."

Maylin could neither confirm nor deny it. She watched Kahron with something complicated that she couldn't quite resolve.

Kahron, under the horrified stares of everyone present, looked untroubled. He turned toward Joel and smiled.

"You did see blood, didn't you."

Not a question. Anyone watching could have been certain: what had just happened had been entirely intentional.

"You dare—"

Joel's face cycled through colors. He looked like a man who wanted very much to do something about this and was discovering, rapidly, that there was nothing available to do.

Clap. Clap. Clap.

The Count stepped forward, applauding.

"Hahaha! Magnificent!"

The room exhaled collectively and followed his lead, slowly, into uncertain applause. The victory announcement came late.

"Kahron wins!"

It landed in air that had already gone cold.

The Count moved to Kahron's side and placed a hand on his shoulder—the height difference made it an awkward reach, the Count having to stretch—but no one in the room was in a position to find it amusing.

"This is exactly what I expected from the knight I've had my eye on."

The knights nearby made surprised sounds. This degree of direct declaration was apparently unusual, even from him.

"Have you reconsidered joining our order? If there's something more you want, say it. I'll do everything I can."

There were a great many people watching, and one of those people had, minutes ago, left an arm on the floor. The Count had chosen this moment to court Kahron publicly, assembling an atmosphere in which declining would be difficult.

In the original novel, Kahron had refused every offer the Count made. Even with her presence already altering the story, she didn't think that particular fact had changed.

But Kahron—who she'd expected to refuse immediately—glanced at Joel first. Then back to the Count. Then he said, with measured courtesy:

"I am honored. But as I've said, I travel—I need more time to consider."

"Take all the time you need! You're young, your future is long, and you're already clearing this county's monsters. Can I not spare a little time for that?" The Count was skilled at this—smoothing resistance, making the person being maneuvered feel accommodated. Standing across from each other, both of them smiling, they looked almost like a lord and his sworn man already.

"Father. What are you—"

Joel had been staring, slow to understand. He started to protest, caught the look his father turned on him, and went quiet. The Count was watching his son with an expression like an undrawn blade.

"That's enough for tonight. Joel—go inside and rest."

The Count declared the party over and left with his wife. Servants streamed back toward the hall—the guests could go to bed, but the servants had work waiting. Maylin was a servant, and she turned to follow—then stopped, and went to Kahron first.

"You're not hurt anywhere?"

Hurt. Right. He'd practically been airborne through most of it. Still—she hadn't watched every single moment. Something might have caught him when her attention was elsewhere. The fact that she'd been watching with enough focus that her eyes had dried out was something she chose not to examine.

He'd been smiling through all of it—beautiful smiles worn while doing unkind things—and had returned to his usual expressionless state. He looked at her face in silence.

"When do you finish?"

The question arrived from nowhere. She blinked.

"Work? Tonight it'll probably run late, with everything to clean up from the—"

If there'd been no party, she'd have been done already. A party thrown for someone like Joel. What an extraordinary waste of everyone's time.

Kahron took one step closer and tilted his head down toward her.

"You said you'd do whatever I wanted."

"……."

"I won." A trace of something pleased in his voice, faint and infuriating. It landed somewhere it shouldn't. "Didn't I."

Maylin worked to keep her pulse where it belonged and corrected him.

"I didn't say whatever. I said I'd do it."

Something. Unspecified. She'd committed to it without knowing what it was, because the alternative—imagining him losing—had made her brain stop working, and she'd made the promise before remembering that he was a Sword Master and that Sword Masters did not lose fights. The reasoning had been spectacular in its failure.

"What are you going to ask for?"

She looked up at him with cautious eyes. His lit with interest. That was worse.

"We'll see."

He left it there, turned, and walked off in the direction of the outdoor baths. She was not going to repeat the mistake of following him to the baths—she called after him instead, only one thing:

"You did well!"

A strange thing to say to someone who had just deliberately removed a knight's arm below the elbow. And yet he hadn't been hurt, and she was genuinely relieved, and somehow those facts outweighed the strangeness.

She was leaving the training grounds when she noticed Joel—still there, not yet gone. The surprise stopped her feet. He looked at her, jaw tight, then turned sharply and disappeared.

He'd gone. Good.

The relief was real. So was the uneasy certainty that followed it: that this was not the end of anything, and that the inconvenient events still ahead had not yet been decided.