Strife & Valor: Book II of The Rorke Burningsoul Saga by Regina Watts (red queen ebook .TXT) 📕

“You always were a fighter of reasonable skill,” he admitted, dodging a slash only to have his sword nearly knocked from his hands as I swung into another flurry. What a balanced blade! I might have laughed for the pleasure of the fight if he would not have been offended. As it was, he continued on to ask in a tone of consternated appreciation, “But where did you learn to fight like this?”

“Only the blessing of a god can permit a man to win a duel against one such as you, Commander.”

With a humorless smirk, he eased up on his sword, then tried to knock my leg out from under me and keep me from another blitz. Before he could get near such a thing, however, I had already followed through on a slice through the air. My blade sank into his pauldron. The metal of the armor gave way like wool, and as the Commander hissed I was amazed to find how easily the sword came away from the wound it had made.

Blood flowed through the gap in Zweiding’s armor. The cheers that had begun with the battle had by now faded to shocked murmurs. Face hardened by the pain, Zweiding charged me with incredible strength.

Now it was I who stood at the defense, though the sword that had been, as promised, gifted to me in my most needful hour was strong against the assault. It absorbed every blow with minimum impact, its blade still as unnaturally sharp as it had been when first I set my eye upon it. Moreover, it was so graceful that even with the encumbrance of my armor I felt light as a feather when it came to meeting my opponent strike for strike.

As his blows all came to naught, Zweiding’s already reddened face grew hard with frustration. Soon, wrath.

“What nonsense is this,” he shouted, beating his blade against mine to drive me back. “You were never so skilled!”

“Your position in the Order and the worldly adulation you receive for it has blinded you to the will of Weltyr,” I informed him, knocking his sword from his hands to send it sliding across the dirt. “Perhaps, if you went out into the world again, it would teach you that you know far less than you think you do. Do you yield?”

Teeth bared, Zweiding dashed to reclaim his lost weapon. I let him pick it up and stood while he vented his fury on me, each blow angrier than the last until his arms had begun to shake. Only then did I drive him back to our starting places, his blade unsteady in his hands and soon once again upon the ground between us.

The tip of my gleaming sword pressed against the breastplate through which we both knew it could effortlessly tear.

“Do you yield?”

“I’ve never lost a battle,” he said, ducking down to grab his sword again. “You’ll have to kill me.”

Driven by fury and dangerous pride, Zweiding swung his blade against my side and did make impact, though Rigan’s armor held as I had expected it to. Hoping to end the duel, I sliced toward my opponent’s legs.

The shock that blossomed across his features as the blade sliced into his greave to sever the tendons of his leg—it saddened me. How was it that I had been given a blade so deadly only once I asked Weltyr to help me deal more gently with my fellow man?

Perhaps that was why the sword had now arrived. I had proved that my heart’s greatest desire was to act not as conqueror in Weltyr’s name, but defender of it.

Collapsing to the dirt with a cry of pain, Zweiding released his hold of his sword to tear his armor from his bleeding leg. As a medic hurried forward to see the injury and a few high-ranking Order officers followed suit, the Commander forced himself to hiss, “Very well, damn you, very well! I yield, I yield—the battle and Elishta-bet, I yield them both!”

Relief surging through me along with the hollow feeling of victory, I slid the unsheathed weapon into the loop where once hung Strife’s scabbard. The Sword of Weltyr gleamed like new, unstained by blood or the dust of the field.

Valeria’s fast footsteps drew my attention. I turned just in time to catch her in my arms. Embracing her delicate elf’s body to mine, I held her close and kissed her fragrant mouth with a sigh of relief.

“My warrior,” she cried with pride, her features as bright with delight as ever I had seen them. “Oh, Burningsoul! Oh, Rorke! How wonderful you are!”

I chuckled, holding her, that regal face once more a wealth of lovely blue grays in the light of the sun. Drawing the hood down just so over her eyes, I told her, “Wonderful, perhaps. A part of the Order, never.”

Hissing as the medic probed his wound, Zweiding stared up at me in absolute resentment. Part of me did feel a certain shame—I had beaten him so handily that I experienced a twinge of sympathetic embarrassment, though I was quick to reminded myself it was an embarrassment he would not have endured had he been less heinous a person in his heart of hearts. His ways were not the ways of the All-Father he proclaimed to serve, for the All-Father loved all thinking things upon the planet without regard to their race or creed or magical talent. It was only their disobedience to his will that he did not love…and yet I have heard it said that even the tendency toward rebellion, he admires—for the gods, knowing too much, have no free will of their own. Even the All-Father’s True Will is that inevitable force of nature and time that is the sum total of reality.

And it was evident that Zweiding’s free will failed to align with my Master’s True Will. Therefore, I was the tool of his humbling.

If a man’s free will did not align with Weltyr’s