Free Story -- Sisters in Arms
The duellists were the least important branch of the military, Leonide was sure. “Branch of the military” — ha. They barely even were part of the military.
Good morning (EST)! The rights to the short stories in By Her Sword, the anthology I was involved in this past year, have reverted back to their authors, so I’m really pleased to be able to share it for free with all of you.
The duellists were the least important branch of the military, Leonide was sure. “Branch of the military” — ha. They barely even were part of the military.
Technically, they were a sort of elite rank of the palace guard, but as best as she could tell, they didn’t actually do anything. Like the guards, they accompanied the queen at all times while dressed in uniform, but unlike the guards they didn’t stand at attention, or hold their weapons at the ready, or keep their eyes always moving to find threats. No, the duellists dawdled along in the queen’s retinue, flimsy little rapiers very much sheathed. And they flirted. Flirted incessantly with the queen, courtiers, passing servants, even occasionally the guards.
It was unseemly. It was unprofessional. And worst of all, nobody but Leo seemed to mind at all.
Leo stood as straight and stiff as the pike in her hand beside the queen’s chair as the last of the day’s petitioners bowed his way out of the hall. It had been a long one, full of complicated cases of property rights and inheritance squabbles, and she thanked the gods she was nearly at the end of her shift — although even when she was off-shift, she still seemed to spend all of her time preparing for her next one. Cleaning her armor, sharpening her weapons. Still, it would feel good to sit down and relax the part of her brain that was looking for possible threats.
And there, right on cue, the next shift marched in. Bediver led the squad, the silver braid embellishing his coat shining as though he’d polished it just before his shift, which he probably had. If only everyone took their uniform as seriously! Once Leo made captain, nobody would ever see a speck of tarnish on hers. He gave her an approving nod that reinforced her belief that that time would be sooner rather than later, and then they all began the elaborate routine of guard-changing, which made sure that there were always at least three individuals standing to attention and surveying the room at all times. It was an accomplishment to do it all gracefully and in good time (Pol so often tripped herself up on her own feet, which was painful to witness), and the reward was a warm glow of satisfaction.
Meanwhile, the new shift of duellists sauntered in and greeted the two already there. There were jokes. There were winks. There was genial elbowing. As they took up their slouching positions in the corners of the room, one of the new pair caught Pol’s eye and grinned, and when Leo glanced again at Pol, the guard was blushing.
Leo’s guard shift and the duellists due to leave filed out, Leo at the end of a line walking in unison and the other pair, Vell and Dexamine, traipsing about in roughly the same direction. Dexamine’s hair was impractically long, and she tossed it from side to side; Vell’s was at least chin-length, but it was an eye-catching blonde that waved in a way Leo suspected was artificial. (Guard regulations mandated hair no longer than the jawline, and none of them styled it.) Feeling her eye caught, Leo blinked angrily.
Vell couldn’t have noticed that, of course. Nobody could feel an angry blink. But all the same, she fell into step with Leo as Dexamine went on ahead, ambling with her hands behind her back in a way that threw her coat away to reveal her sword’s filigree hilt.
“Lovely day, isn’t it?”
Leo snorted, despite her intent not to make a sound until the squad was out of the presence chamber. “It’s cloudy.”
“But warm!” After that, Vell let her walk in merciful silence for the rest of the way out of the chamber.
It didn’t last. “Do you know, I heard from the Countess di Barri that Count Femy is trying to buy up the entire market’s worth of pearls to make into a strand hundreds of feet long? She said he wants to give it to the queen to entice her into —”
“You should spend less time gossiping with countesses and more time watching for threats to the queen.” It came out harsher than she meant, and Leo winced internally — she didn’t want to be cruel, just to make her priorities clear — but it didn’t seem to faze Vell at all, somehow. She actually laughed.
“Count Femy having designs on influencing the queen with gifts is a threat, isn’t it?”
The worst thing was that she was right. Leo was not about to admit that, though, and just sniffed.
Everyone relaxed once they were far enough from the queen’s general area (apart from Leo, as a rule), and the guards fell out of formation. Pol wrapped her arms around two fellows’ shoulders and proclaimed that it was time for a drink; Dexamine giggled and asked who was buying. The others were headed out to the market, and they peeled off as well. Somehow, despite all her inclinations, Leo was alone with Vell. This happened with a bizarre frequency, when she thought about it.
“Not going off with the rest?”
“It’s none of your business what I do when I’m off duty,” Leo snapped.
Vell held up her hands with a smile. “Of course not.” Then she leaned forward. “Or is it?”
“You’re ridiculous.”
“Maybe we’re ridiculous.”
“For all the gods’ sake,” Leo said, half-crazed with annoyance, and turned the corner so recklessly that she almost ran headlong into a maidservant in a plain brown dress and a neat linen cap and apron. That made her even more irritated — look, Vell was a hazard to all the staff, not just her — which she knew was unfair, but Vell’s behavior was always so confusing that it riled her up to an absurd degree.
“I am so sorry,” she said, but before she could go on to explain that it was Vell’s fault, something tickled her brain, throwing up a warning. Despite her irritation, she paid attention to that sort of thing and took a second look, which showed her … soft hands. The wrong kind of shoes. And then as her eyes traveled suspiciously up to the maid’s face, the woman’s eyes narrowed and her stance shifted into one Leo recognized very well.
This wasn’t a servant. It was an assassin.
The woman had a dagger in her hand, suddenly, one of those thin stilettos that were made only to thrust between the ribs to the heart. That was good: those things didn't have much of an edge, being all point, which meant you could knock them aside pretty easily with an arm or a boot. But also, every assassin Leo had come across or heard about who worked with a stiletto also coated it in poison, one of the really bad ones, so it only took a nick to kill you or, at best, to result in the surgeons having to take off a limb to stop it from spreading.
She took a step forward and leveled the pike in her left hand, then drew her short sword with her right. Best try not to have to touch the dagger at all, then.
Vell drew her own whippy little rapier. “Get back,” she said to Leo in a voice that was suddenly steel rather than velvet, and Leo risked a startled glance sideways.
“I’m a member of the queen’s guard,” Leo reminded her. “I’m supposed to —”
“This is exactly what I’m here for,” Vell snapped, and darted forward to strike at the assassin, who was already diving away nimbly.
That would have been all to the good, except that then there was the tap-tap-tap of someone else running up in soft boots, and when Leo spun to tell whatever courtier she was assuming needed to be told to get the seven hells out of there, she found herself facing up with a second assassin, taller and broader, with his own stiletto.
It was a good thing, at least, that she and Vell were each busy with their own opponents. Leo would have been completely thrown off her rhythm if she’d been thinking that Vell was watching her, checking her form, noticing every flaw in her stance. As it was, the second assassin was taking all of her attention. By rights, she should have been able to cut him to ribbons — two blades versus one, big weapons versus tiny — but you didn’t get hired to kill the queen with a little poisoned stiletto unless you were very, very good. He kept dodging, lithe body shifting and bouncing back and forth, while testing her defenses with his dagger.
One nick. All it took was one nick. One stab. One cut. That would be failure. Leo couldn’t fail. She couldn’t last through the siege only to fall in a back corridor to some stupid unfair poison trick.
There was a sound from behind her, a woman’s whimper, and Leo couldn’t stop herself from turning to make sure that Vell hadn’t been hurt with the wicked little weapon, because — she couldn’t — not again! But it was the assassin who was drawing back, blood on the arm holding the stiletto, and Vell was shaking her head exultantly to throw her hair back. A rush of relief went through Leo and she sagged, the point of her pike dropping involuntarily.
The male assassin saw his chance — stupid of her to give it to him — and rushed forward for a blow that would punch through her leather armor before she could lift either of her weapons again. He was fast, so fast, and Leo’s blood was pumping so hot and loud in her ears —
And a silver rapier appeared between them, batting the stiletto aside and piercing the man’s shoulder before pulling back. Vell caught her eye and winked, and for the first time, Leo really got why everyone seemed to find the duellists so gods-damned attractive. Time hung still for a moment, the light from the window turning solid between them and the bead of blood on the point of Vell’s rapier holding on …
Then the man swore in Citralian and the blood dripped to the flagstones, and the other assassin was darting toward them so quickly that Leo barely had time to swing her pike around to ward her away. But the battle was more than half done. The male assassin was flagging, with his wound (not a mortal one at all unless it got infected, but certainly hard to fight with), and the female one seemed to realize she wasn’t going to get past Vell’s flashy but deadly moves. Together, they started maneuvering to get Leo and Vell into the corner where the corridor bent at a right angle, made one last powerful push, and then turned and sprinted away in opposite directions. Leo met Vell’s eyes again, and all it took was the glance for them both to know what was going on — they split and followed their quarry.
This was worse than the fight by yards. Leo wasn’t a runner, she was built for stamina rather than speed, and she had to push herself beyond her limits to follow him. He was still wounded, though, and the pain had to be eating at him. What was she going to do when she caught him? He still had that bloody poisoned stiletto …
It turned out not to matter, because just as she was bearing down on him, he put out a hand and somehow — impossibly — flipped himself out a window. Leo skidded to a halt, chest heaving, and watched him run across the roofs. When he was far enough away that it was obvious she couldn’t chase him, he turned back, raised a middle finger, and shouted some more Citralian oaths at her. She gave him a mock salute with the hand still clutching her sword, too exhausted to do anything else.
The only thing left to do was to go back to the queen and her on-duty guards and report it. They’d have to beef up security with rank-and-file soldiers, and put the investigators onto rooting out more assassins, and all kinds of things that were fortunately well above Leo’s pay grade. She ought to be thinking about what she was going to say as she legged it back toward the presence chamber — she’d be essentially reporting directly to the queen, for all the gods’ sakes — but her thoughts turned relentlessly to Vell, and whether she’d caught her woman, or if she’d gotten close to her again and then the woman had swiped out with that dagger and its poisoned tip and … and …
There was no point in thinking about it, but her thoughts wouldn’t stop racing around and around even faster than her feet, her head swimming with the effort of keeping them going even while she knew her face was taking on that same impassive outlook she always wore.
It’s the work, she reminded herself. This is what we do, this is what we’re here for. Any of them could die at any time doing it. She knew that better than anybody.
When she reached the queen’s presence chamber, though, Vell was jogging toward it from the other direction, and Leo’s breath left her lungs in the loudest exhale she might have ever made. The duellist was mussed and sweaty and limping slightly, but a very welcome sight.
“Oh, gods,” said Vell. “I was — well, I know you’re good, you’re the best of the guard, but —”
Leo only had time to nod before they were admitted into the queen’s presence, ushered through the heavy oaken door to stand before the court. “Your majesty,” Vell began as soon as they were announced, and Leo was grateful that all she had to do was stand there with her eyes semi-focused on the cloth of state while the matter was explained. Her hands would be shaking if she weren’t clasping them so tightly behind her back, she knew, and the thought made her clasp them all the tighter. Assassins. Danger. Prevent. She understood the words that went flying past, but she didn’t have to follow them entirely; she and Vell weren’t on duty and weren’t fresh enough to be useful anyway. The queen, brow furrowed, said something and Vell was bowing which meant Leo should also be bowing, so she bowed too, and then they were backing out of the chamber, thank the gods.
“I don’t think either of us really needs medical attention,” said Vell, “but when the queen orders it I suppose you’d better check in, hm? Oh, holy hells, are you all right?”
“I’m fine” came out of Leo’s mouth by rote, but her knees were buckling, and she reached out behind her for the wall as she slid down to the floor. Oh, she wasn’t fine.
“Right.” Vell descended in a more careful fashion than Leo had, brushing aside her coattails in order to sit right on her breeches. Immediately, she reached out for Leo’s hands and started to check them over, then pushed up the sleeves of her coat to look at her wrists and forearms. “Did he get you? If the cut’s small enough, there should still be time — you should have said —”
Not too roughly, Leo pushed her off. “No. I didn’t get poisoned, it’s nothing.” It wasn’t that, anyway. She concentrated on breathing normally while Vell stared at her, and pretended that she was alone. It was stupid, it was so stupid, she was supposed to be over this …
She was aware of Vell continuing to stare, but there was nothing to be done about that. Well, she could walk away. She did a quick internal survey and decided that she might be able to get back to her feet; it took a lot of leaning against the wall with Vell hovering nearby, but she managed it. Right — they had to get to the guard physician to be looked over. Leo would have rather gone to her bed and slept for half a day, but it was a order, so she’d do it. What did she have apart from her job and her loyalty?
Unfortunately, Vell was going the same way for the same reason, so she couldn’t be avoided even though she was staying suspiciously quiet. Leo just kept her eyes front and concentrated on making her breaths steady and even, but before they’d even turned the next corner she felt herself trembling too hard to keep going, and had to hold herself up with the wall and put her face against it, hidden between her arms.
“Oh, dragonsbreath,” she heard Vell say behind her, and then those delicate duellist’s hands were dancing over her shoulders and arms. This time, she didn’t have the strength to put up a facade of untouchability and straighten herself up: she just exhaled a quiet sob into the wall.
Vell didn’t say anything else, but Leo could feel her waiting. She was obviously not going to go anywhere until Leo was able to pull herself together and explain what was going on.
“It’s,” she started, her voice muffled by the stone, but she didn’t know how to finish the sentence. “Fallorfell.”
“What?”
Of course that wasn’t enough to make the problem plain. “When the queen was at the castle Fallorfell this spring,” Leo managed to say, “on progress. And I was — there were —”
But that had been enough for Vell to understand, her mind as quick as her footwork. “Oh, gods,” she breathed. “The tower.”
When the queen was on progress, she sometimes stayed with nobles she liked, who had pleasing conversation and acceptable politics, who would be proud of the honor of hosting her despite the massive expense and disruption. And sometimes she stayed with nobles she didn’t like, who needed their coffers drained and a reminder that she was in charge. The baron of Fallorfell was one of the latter, a dissident who’d been sullen and irritating ever since her accession to the throne over his preferred candidate. Usually a royal visit on progress was enough to bring his sort to heel, but the baron was made of different stuff than most — his family had lived out in the mountains for generations, and they were more willing to get their hands dirty.
The queen’s guards had gotten her up into a crumbling tower at the center of Fallorfell, a more defensible place, and arrayed themselves at the bottom of the twisting stair to engage the baron’s soldiers. It had been the best and only strategy, and it had worked: the baron hadn’t gotten through to kill the queen by the time reinforcements arrived. But it had left all the other guards dead or dying, and it had been touch and go for Leo with her wound and then her fever. A month later, she’d insisted she was well enough to serve again, the baron already decisively set down and ready to be forgotten, and the world had moved on.
For everyone but Leo.
Most of the time, she was fine. A little self-serious, everyone knew; overly concerned with making sure every link in her chainmail was polished and every rivet solid. Nobody had forgotten about Fallorfell, they still referred to it when it was relevant or made dark jokes, but it wasn’t real to them in the same way. They hadn’t fought there in a tight stairwell, elbow to elbow with their fellows, watching them get cut and hit and stabbed and gutted, seen them bleed out or have their heads stoven in, hadn’t been pierced through with a pike and been sure they were dying just like their friends who were already staring glassy-eyed at the wall.
Everyone knew the guard never saw much real action, apart from occasionally stopping someone recklessly charging through a crowd or taking care of bandits who didn’t realize whose carriage they were chasing down — that was just how it was. If the queen’s personal guard were in real combat, there was a bigger problem than just the danger they were in: something had failed, something was breaking down. You had to be capable of proper fighting, of course, and there was plenty of training and drilling for that eventuality, but it wasn’t the same as being in the infantry. You didn’t go into it with the same expectations.
Usually she managed to be alone when it hit her. At night, in bed, before she drifted off to sleep, she was suddenly right back there and had to sit bolt upright, panting and gasping like she’d just run a mile in full armor. Something squeezed her heart and made her feel she was actually still lying there with a pike in her side and that everything since then had been a hallucination. Or, worse, she felt that the guards who’d died that day were reaching out to her, trying to grab her from beyond the living world to drag her down with them as she deserved, winding their fingers in her clothes and her hair to pull her to her own death.
Nothing like that, nothing where there was real danger of death, had happened again until this incident. Nothing where she might have died, and worse, where someone else might have died beside her.
“Are you breathing?” she vaguely heard Vell ask beside her. “You need to breathe, Leo. Come on, in, out …” At another time, that might have annoyed her, but following their side-by-side battle with the poisoned daggers, she didn’t take it as a condescending imposition. Instead, she breathed.
After a moment, most of her dizziness fading away, she looked up. Vell had been disheveled after the fight and ensuing chase, but now her face was drawn in an entirely different way, with no traces of her usual mirth. “Let’s go find a cloister to sit in for a bit.”
“Not necessary,” said Leo, trying to go rigid again and failing. “I’m fine now. The queen said —”
“The queen isn’t going to behead you for waiting to get checked out by the guard medic,” Vell retorted, and slipped her arm into Leo’s, an intimacy she’d normally never allow. It felt nice, though; like an offer of support, rather than a liberty.
The nearest courtyard was around a few corners, and by the time they reached it, Leo felt almost normal again. The fresh air was even more restorative than the walk had been, even though the open space was covered with paving stones rather than one of the gardens that were in the larger palace lacunae: it was quiet and empty, and Leo found the dusty smell to be calming, in a way. There was a half-wall separating the cloister from the open center, and Vell deposited her on it, then sat down herself without any of her usual grace. They each leaned back against a column, almost in unison, and stared at each other.
This wasn’t the Vell she knew, who irritated Leo at every turn with her insouciance and unserious attitude. And she wasn’t the Leo that presumably irritated Vell at every turn by being emotionless and uptight, she guessed. It was a bit funny, now that she was feeling things again, and she let herself crack a smile, which seemed to make Vell’s posture relax.
Leo cleared her dry throat. “Thank you for … all this. I’ll dedicate a gold cup in the temple of whichever deity you like best.”
“Eh.” Vell shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. I don’t mind. You really scared me, you know.”
“With all of the … not breathing and that?”
“Sure — but mostly the having to fight someone with a knife that could kill you at first blood. That’s my job, not yours, and I didn’t know if you could handle it.” That might have come off as dismissive from someone else, but Vell’s frankness made it clear that she was more annoyed with herself than anything else. “You could, though, clearly. For what it’s worth.”
“You could have gotten me out of your hair for good,” said Leo, trying for levity, and Vell did give her a tired smile in response.
“But then who would I flirt with?”
The balance Leo had found while they’d walked suddenly deserted her again, as though a carpet had been tugged from under her feet (although she always planted her feet very deliberately in such a way that anyone would find it very difficult to pull a carpet out from under them, so maybe it wasn’t the right metaphor).
It might just be a joke — like it was funny for Vell to suggest she’d been flirting because it was so obvious that she hadn’t, that she wouldn’t, not with boring, staid Leo. Yes, that had to be it, because who would flirt with Leo? But Vell was giving her a look that, well, Leo wasn’t the best at interpreting looks, but it seemed soft. Truthful.
She was waiting too long to respond, taking too long to think about this conundrum. Vell’s gentle smile slowly shifted into a puzzled expression as Leo failed to say anything, her head tilting to one side and her eyebrows drawing together, but finally Leo found her voice.
“You … flirt with me?” That was meant to come out as a snappy, sarcastic comeback, but Leo could hear a kind of plaintive whine in it, her total lack of knowledge shining through.
“Yes,” Vell admitted immediately, as though it were simple and obvious. “All the time. The others say I’m scaling a brick wall, but I told myself I’d wear you down and make you crack a smile one of these days.” After she spoke, there was a hideous silence.
Leo didn’t know how to respond to someone flirting with her, or to the idea that someone had been flirting with her for quite some time. She didn’t know how to handle any situation where she was wrong-footed other than turning to stone. But she didn’t want to turn to stone! Not this time, at least. She didn't know what she actually wanted to do, so much, but she wanted something other than her usual limited social skillset.
Of course, it was left to Vell to fill the silence. “Sorry,” she said, “really. You’ve just had — a whole thing, you don’t need me and my nonsense.” There was a bitter, self-reproachful twist to her mouth that Leo had never seen on her before. It was beginning to dawn on Leo that not only had Vell been flirting with her at all, but that flirtation was more than the playful, meaningless banter the duellists tended to keep up with the courtiers.
A slightly strangled sound came out of her throat, and Leo shook her head to clear it so she could try again. “No,” she said. “I mean — I just didn’t expect that.”
Vell’s eyebrows rose. “Really?”
“Maybe you should have been less subtle,” Leo retorted, and when Vell tipped her head back to bubble over with laughter that echoed in the empty cloister, she found herself ready to laugh a little as well as she took in the pleasing sight of color coming back to Vell’s cheeks.
“Nobody’s ever accused me of subtlety, I assure you,” Vell said once she’d come back to herself, though amusement still thrummed in her voice.
Leo shrugged. “Too subtle for me, anyway.” She really was a brick wall, when you got down to it, and she felt a bit of heat go to her own cheeks.
When they sat quietly and regarded each other after that, there was a comfort in it instead of tension. Everything about Vell was the same as before, but somehow there was a difference to every quality in Leo’s eyes: the smile was kind rather than mocking, the beauty a gift rather than a taunt. She’d never managed to have such an understanding, such a rapport with anyone else. And it had come so easily, once she’d let it. How could that have happened?
Vell reached out and took Leo’s calloused hand with both of her own, treating it like a delicate piece of porcelain. When she bent to kiss the knuckles, she moved simply and without the smoldering look up to the owner that Leo had seen as part of that maneuver before, and then she ran her thumb over the spot she’d kissed as though she could impress it into the skin.
“My lady,” she said. “Or — good sir? Both of them fit you, I think.”
The warmth that filled Leo’s chest at the simplicity of it put paid to any remaining heart-pounding from the fight or her memories of Fallorfell. Gods, she’d been misreading Vell for so long — but not any longer.
“You’re ridiculous,” said Leo, but with a fondness that had never filled those words from her lips before.
Thanks for reading! Don’t hesitate to send this on to someone you think might like it! 💖