The wizard claimed it was simply a way to stay warm, since a man of his advanced years had no business using a sword with serious intent, but Bahzell doubted his disclaimer fooled anyone. And the Horse Stealer knew it didn't fool anyone who'd ever had the dubious pleasure of crossing blades with the "old man," whether it was merely for practice or not. The expression on Brandark's face when Wencit disarmed him three times in five minutes had been priceless, and although Bahzell himself managed to hold his own against the wizard, it was a very near thing. In fact, Wencit managed to "kill" him almost as often as the Horse Stealer managed to "kill" the wizard. Bahzell would have liked to think it was because Wencit's sword was enchanted, which—as anyone who'd ever seen him confront dark wizards knew—it most certainly was. Unfortunately, the hradani couldn't quite convince himself that magic explained what Wencit could make that sword do. For all his vast age, the wild wizard remained hard-muscled and supple (no doubt the wild magic had a little something to do with that), and he'd had over twelve centuries to pick up tricks of swordplay Bahzell hadn't even heard of yet.

But much as Bahzell enjoyed sparring with Wencit and adding some of those same tricks to his own repertoire, his bouts with Kaeritha gave him even greater pleasure. His respect not only for her but for her teachers was enormous. She was more than a foot and a half shorter than he, and she might weigh a third as much as he did when she was wringing wet. Most of his weight advantage was muscle and hard bone, as well, and there was no way she should be able to stand up to him in one-on-one combat.

Yet no one had ever told her that, and if he was far stronger, with a much longer reach, she compensated for those disadvantages with speed, skill, and raw aggressiveness. A blow from a sword the size of Bahzell's, even if it was a blunted training weapon, could break bone, mail or no, but that didn't faze Kaeritha. She dove straight in at him with an apparent disregard for possible injury which turned his blood cold the first time he saw it—especially when he considered what would happen to her if she did the same thing against edged weapons. But even as he was thinking that, her toe hooked behind his right ankle, she heaved, and he went down in the snow to find the tip of her sword pressed firmly against his gorget.

Or, rather, the tip of one of her swords, for she used a technique he'd never before confronted, although he'd heard something like it described by Horse Stealers who'd faced Sothōii war maids. Rather than one sword, or even a sword and a dagger, she fought with a sword in each hand. They were light blades which he suspected she'd designed herself, somewhere between the eighteen inches of the Royal and Imperial Infantry's shortsword and the three feet of Vaijon's longsword, but she wielded them with a speed and dexterity which had to be seen to be believed. She couldn't use a shield with them, but Bahzell quickly discovered that her technique more than compensated for the lack of one. Even more impressive, she seemed to use either hand with absolute impartiality, and she could shift the emphasis of her attack between them with devastating speed. It was rather like fighting a whirlwind, and once she got inside an opponent's sword, her victim usually ended up wishing a whirlwind was all he'd been fighting.

She was equally skilled with the quarterstaff she carried upright in her stirrup as another knight might have carried a lance. She was the only person Bahzell had ever met who actually used a staff from horseback, and she spent at least twenty minutes practicing with it every day. Brandark, who had never had the misfortune to encounter a quarterstaff in skilled hands and so tended to look down upon the weapon, made the mistake of chuckling over her antics with it one morning. Fortunately for the Bloody Sword, she decided to treat his amusement as the product of ignorance, not an insult, so instead of cracking him smartly over the head, she made him a wager. She bet him that she could strike a dozen eggs out of the air as quickly as he could throw them at her, and then, for an encore, cracked—not broke , but simply cracked —a half-dozen more with overhead strikes while they lay neatly lined up on a wagon tongue. The wager cost Brandark two gold kormaks, but it also cured him of any misplaced contempt for her chosen weapon.

Bahzell, on the other hand, who had never felt any particular temptation to laugh at staff play, found that it took him several days to adjust to her style. And despite the difference in their sizes, he was the one who had to adopt the more defensive stance until he began to get a feel for it, for her speed and skill offset much of his advantage in reach and raw strength. She was like a terrier worrying an elk hound, charging in and pressing an attack so fast and furious he had no choice but to defend himself. But her technique also required her to parry every attack he could launch with one of her primary weapons, since she used no shield, and if he could hold off her initial, all-out assault, his longer reach, stronger muscles, and heavier blade came into their own once more.

In most ways, the time he spent sparring with Wencit—or, for that matter, Brandark or the male knights and lay-brothers of the Order—was more valuable to him. He was never going to adopt Kaeritha's style, and he'd probably never run into an enemy who used the same technique. Certainly he was unlikely to encounter anyone who used it as furiously as she did! He was much more likely to pick up some new move to add to his own style from the more conventional swordplay of one of the other male members of the party, and he knew it, but the sheer pleasure of seeing her in action made all that irrelevant. Her sleek, deadly speed was a joy to watch, and for all the apparent fury of her technique, it was actually wrapped around a core of lethal precision.

No doubt he should have expected that from someone who'd been chosen as one of Tomanāk's champions on the very day of her knighting, but that made it no less impressive. Even more to the point, perhaps, that sense of kinship he'd felt from the start grew stronger with each day. She settled effortlessly into place in the party, slipping into a friendship not simply with Bahzell but with Brandark, as well, which was as deep as it was inevitable. In fact, the one complaint Bahzell had was that, like Zarantha, Kaeritha actually encouraged the Bloody Sword's efforts to improve upon The Lay of Bahzell Bloody-Hand , and she had a dismayingly good singing voice which she insisted upon using to help him along. She'd gone into whoops of hysterical laughter the first time Brandark played it for her, and he could get her to start giggling simply by humming it. Hearing an anointed champion of Tomanāk who could easily have cut almost anyone else in the party into dog meat giggle would have been unnerving under any circumstances, but to have her take such unmitigated glee in suggesting fresh rhymes to Brandark was the outside of enough. Even worse, she soon discovered that Vaijon had a splendid tenor singing voice, and when she got Wencit into the act as well...

They made very good time from Axe Hallow to Lordenfel, but somehow the spritely notes of a balalaika and the tuneful trio singing along with it managed to make the trip seem very, very long.