Death After Death PLUS 196-198

Ch. 196 - Making A Mess

The first thing they did that morning was sweep with the straw brooms that had been brought for just this purpose. Bertrand had balked at that, but Simon had insisted it was a vital part of the process. It wasn’t, truthfully, but it would make what was coming next easier. 

Next, they went back up to the clifftop, and in the full light of day, Simon bid his student study the dark canyon floor below. “Tell me, Bertrand, do you see the canvas we have prepared?”

“I do,” he agreed, “But it is too dark for charcoal. Are we going to use chalk to draw this time?”

“Draw?” Simon asked. “You said that your hand would not obey your mind. I think we will cease with the drawing and try something else.”

“Oh?” the young man expressed surprise. “What did you have in…”

Bertrand’s words trailed off as Simon moved to the wagon, picked up the closest vase, and then, without a word of explanation, threw it over the cliff, where it shattered into a million pieces on the ground below.

The boy only looked on in shock as Simon reached for the next one. “Well, what are you waiting for?” Simon asked. “Help me get these down there so we can get started.”

“Get started? What? Master, stop!” Bertrand cried out as Simon through the second vase down to join the first. “What are you… why are you destroying such beautiful…”

Simon stopped the boy’s speech by thrusting the third one into his hands. “You said that your art was getting nowhere because your hands would not produce the beauty you could imagine, so we are going to try something else,” Simon said closely, forcing Bertrand to meet his eye. “I have found you the most beautiful ceramics in all of northern Ionia. You could ask for no finer materials, and together, you and I will try our hands at mosaics instead.”

“Mosaics?” the young man asked. 

“Yes, mosaics,” Simon nodded. “Now, get the rest of our tiles together while I take the cement and the grout down.”

Simon left him standing there holding that vase. The boy didn’t say a word, but then he didn’t need to. The look on his face made it clear that he thought Simon had gone completely mad, and Simon was inclined to let him. 

It took him another five minutes to throw the next vase down, and it was more than half an hour before the cart was emptied. They spent much of that second day sweeping a second time. The first time, it had been to remove the rocks and sad, and the second time, it was to gather the thousands of shards they’d created into one giant, glittering, multicolored pile. 

The experience was hard on Bertrand, but Simon ignored that. Instead, after they had dinner, he started to pick out the pieces of plain white and build a giant border on the floor of the canyon. The work would take days to complete, but in his mind, it was an important part of the process. 

“Mosaics, I understand,” his student complained, “but why out here? Why not in our mountain summer home or with—”

“In the city, you will be distracted by your friends, and in the country, you will be distracted by the serving girls,” Simon answered simply. “Here, there is only me, and I will keep all distractions far away from you until you make progress.”

“What is it I’m supposed to make anyway?” The boy asked, still looking for direction instead of making his own. “I’ve never even thought about—”

“Your subject matter can be whatever you like, so long as it fills the canvas I am making for you,” Simon explained. “But neither of us will leave here until you have something worth showing to your father. He’s invested significant funds into this lesson and will want to see it pay off.”

Bertrand protested that he could leave whenever he wanted, even after Simon explained to him that he would not be welcome at his estates unless he came back with a satisfied teacher, so eventually, Simon’s most powerful rebuttal was to lay down by their fire and go to sleep. 

In the days that followed, the boy sullenly sorted the large pile of shards by color, cutting his fingers a handful of times in the process. He made no further progress, though, content to complain instead of seeking inspiration. 

Simon found it tiresome but ignored it. It seemed like a vital part of the process. Instead, he used his chalk to decorate the walls of the canyon, leaving the illustrations up until the infrequent rains washed them away. Sometimes, he drew people he’d known, like Gregor or Freya, but more often, he grew monsters he’d fought before. Sometimes, it was goblins and other times, it was wyverns or spiders, but all of them were terrifying when drawn as close to life-size as he could manage on the vast dark walls of the canyon.

Simon didn’t do it to inspire his student, though it turned out that’s what he did, eventually. He was just doing it to pass the time between hunting trips. Still, on one occasion, after almost two weeks of waiting, he found Bertrand busily moving pieces around the vast twenty-foot-wide canvas that Simon had framed for him. 

Simon didn’t ask what the boy was up to. Not for a long time. Instead, he waited for him to volunteer that information. It was apparent that he had no plans to do that, though. He obviously wanted Simon to guess, but Simon refused to, so the two shared an amiable sort of silence. They would still talk about other things like the weather or his most recent hunting trip, but those conversations never wandered quite to the subject of the artwork that was slowly but surely taking shape. 

The thing started with a piece of the sea, using elaborate little swirls of light blue on dark to indicate the waves. Simon could see at once that the limitations of the medium were helping his student. He was no longer trying to make things perfect. Instead, he was using the best he had, which was exactly what Simon had hoped for. 

Still, for as long as he thought the boy was making a map of Ionia, he was a little disappointed. That showed a real lack of imagination, even if it was exactly the sort of art his father would have approved of. 

In the third week of the endeavor, though, as the boy started off on a different section, Simon finally understood what it was he was making. Unfortunately, that was also when they were attacked by bandits. 

“What do we have here?” a rough-looking man asked, intruding on them one morning while they were making frybread over an open fire. “All this food, and you didn’t ask us to join you. How shameful.”

Of course, they had very little in the way of food, but men like this didn’t really care. They would take the last crumbs from a starving man if they could. Still, even as the small gang of ruffians approached the fire, Simon did not stand, nor did he draw his sword or his dagger, though he had them both belted on under the robes. He favored these days. 

“You are welcome to warm yourselves by our fire,” Simon said. “Though we have little else to offer you.”

“Two fancy men making art in the middle of nowhere?” the leader laughed as he came to a stop, standing over the two of them.  “You may not have much, but I’ll wager your families would pay a hefty ransom to see you safe again.”

“My father—” Bertrand started, but Simon cut him off. 

“Send ransom letters to whoever you like,” Simon spat. “I’ll help you draft them if you don’t know how to write, but I must insist that you do not interrupt our project. Not when Andus the Undefeatable is so close to taking shape.”

“Oh yeah,” the leader asked, brandishing a knife while his friends chuckled. “What are you going to do if I cut an ear off the boy to include in the letter to his—”

He never had a chance to finish that statement. It was clear he didn’t think much of Simon as an old man, but he wasn’t half so old as he pretended to be, and even as the bandit leader looked away, he grabbed the handle of the cast iron frying pan and sprang to his feet. 

By the time the man had turned back to face Simon, it was just in time to take the hot metal across the face, and his skin sizzled even as his nose was crushed by the force of the blow. The other three men looked confused as their leader crumpled and scampered back, but that only gave Simon the chance to draw his weapons. 

He didn’t give them the same courtesy. Though he very much missed his shield, it wasn’t a good fit for the person he was in this life, so instead, he wielded a dagger in his offhand to parry certain blows. This time, he took the second man in the chest with it and the third man across the throat with his saber before the fourth man had even drawn his blade.  

There were screams and chaos as everyone tried to fight him then, but as far as he was concerned, the fight was already done. One man was dead, one was dying, and though he took a few shallow cuts that proper armor would have prevented, he was soon surrounded by bodies while his student sat there gawking. 

“Master Ennis, you’re bleeding,” Bertrand gasped when it was all done. 

“A little,” Simon agreed, “But not so bad as any of them.”

The truth was that at least one of the stabs was quite deep, and Simon had a hard time disguising his pain while he went to fetch the donkey and use words of lesser healing to mend the worst of it. He made sure not to burden his charge with that, though. He simply sent the boy off to continue with his art, and once Simon was cleaned up, he dumped the bodies far enough away that he wouldn’t have to smell them rot. 

Simon spent much of that day recuperating, and by the evening, he decided he might have to heal himself further. No matter how much he tried to walk it off, he wasn’t as young as he used to be. 

“Where did you learn to fight like that, master Enniss,” Bertrand finally asked softly once the cook fire had all but dimmed later that night.

“I am an old man,” Simon answered with a shrug. “I have done many things in my life. Haven’t you noticed the monsters I draw? Do you think they come solely from my imagination?”

“I mean, you’d mentioned it before, but I always thought such things were just stories,” he added. 

“Even things that are just stories have a measure of truth,” Simon agreed. “I was once a fierce warrior, but I turned to art to find some peace, and as you can see, those men took a few pieces out of me because of that. In my prime… in armor… I would have cut them down like the mangy scavengers they were.”

Bertrand nodded, then said, “I have one other question. When did you know what I was working on? In the mosaic?”

“From the very beginning,” Simon lied. “I could see it in the colors you chose when you laid down the first few pieces.”

Bertrand accepted that answer. Indeed, he treated it almost as a form of praise. 

Simon thought that the act of violence would have disrupted the flow that his student was slowly building, but he only sped up after that. The first part of the large mosaic had taken over a week to lay out, but the second took half that time, and the third was faster still. As the man that had founded the nation finally appeared in the center as Bertrand slowly moved to fill in the last of the space with a flock of harpies descending from the jagged mountains, Simon was reasonably certain that the boy had chosen to make the legendary hero look just a bit like him, and he was touched by the gesture. 

Ch. 197 - Introductions

Of course, even after a month, the work was only halfway done. They still spent days and days cementing the thing in place once Bertrand was happy with the placement of all the pieces. It was only when the entire project was entirely finished, and they’d spent half a day sealing and polishing it with a cake of beeswax that they sat on the canyon rim and admired it from above with a celebratory bottle of wine. 

Simon was pleased. Even if it wasn’t perfect, the giant mosaic below was a much better effort than all of the paintings that Bertrand had made up until now. Once he stopped obsessing over the quality of his lines and his strokes and was forced to use nothing but imperfections, he finally got out of his own way, Simon thought to himself. He said none of that to the boy, though. He was already smiling from ear to ear. Now, all that needed to be done was show his father. 

The two of them returned from the canyon skinner and dirtier from the wear. Simon said nothing about the fight, and Lord Alexin was pleased enough at the mosaic once he’d set eyes on it that he said, “It’s a shame you put it all the way out here where I cannot rub the faces of my rivals in the work of my son.” That was as high a praise as Bertrand was ever likely to receive from the man, but even so, he beamed. 

“Sometimes art must be done for its own sake,” Simon said, “In this case, the audience was only a single person.” He let that comment hang there, unwilling to specify whether the audience was the father, the teacher, or the artist himself. That was the main lesson he’d got from being a teacher so far. The longer he asked questions of children to get them to think about things, the more he realized there were often many answers to the same question. 

The three of them rode back to the house together after that, and on the way, Bertrand’s father offered him a commission to retile the guest house at their summer estate in similar heroic themes. The price for the task was a little low, but that was the way the man was with his tests, and Simon vowed to help the boy cut some costs with a couple of the suppliers he knew to make the project that much more lucrative for him.

In private, Lord Alexin confessed, “I did not know if your mad plan would work, but now, after thinking on it, I believe that simply tearing that boy away from his friends and the girls might have done as much good as all the broken pottery and high-minded ideals in the world.”

“Hence the guest house,” Simon said, acting perfectly aware of the man’s ulterior motive, even though he hadn’t given the isolation part of the project a lot of thought since those first few days when his pupil had been nothing but complaints. 

“Hence the guest house,” the Lord agreed.

Bertrand never mentioned the way that Simon slew the bandits to anyone, but once he completed his task and redid the floors with brand-new works of art for his father to brag about, he begged Simon to add sword lessons to his curriculum. Simon saw no problem with that. He’d done plenty of art at this point and was spending more and more time teaching Bertrand’s younger siblings, so he had plenty of time. He was running down the clock now. 

He’d already established himself as a man with a reputation up and down the coasts of Ionia, and over the next couple of years, he took it somewhat easier. He still worked on art, of course, but they were small private studies rather than giant public works as he’d done so far. He’d gone as far as he could with honing his skills on the sides of buildings. If he wanted to make further progress, he was going to need a more refined medium. Unfortunately, he had no idea how to make oil paints or even acrylic paints. 

There were clues in the name, he supposed, but it was hardly a common art form in Ionia. He’d seen a few paintings in the houses of the wealthy in Abresse, but the only stretched canvases he’d seen were in Brin and their mountainous neighbor to the east. 

It’s so weird that a few hundred miles make such a difference, he thought to himself. On Earth, I could have gotten all this from one trip to the mall.

That was as true of foods as it was of art supplies, of course, though he wasn’t sure if that was true anymore. He had no idea how much time had passed on Earth now since all of this had started. It might have been centuries. At this point, they were in some weird post-human future where they could replicate anything with machines, or the entire place was a post-apocalyptic wasteland. There was no way to know for sure. 

“It doesn’t matter,” he sighed to himself contentedly. “Either way, I’m still out here trying to invent paint.”

Sometimes, he thought about what he could have done with his life if he’d been like this from the start, but it was always an irrelevant question. He never could have been this person from the start. It had taken an awfully long time to hike this far on the road of life, and he felt like he was still nowhere near the peak of the mountain. 

In Simon’s last few years before he turned south again, he only engaged in one complex project, and that was the vampiric knife he’d been designing and daydreaming about for some time. It wasn’t like it was even hard at this point. He had a small private forge he used to make his tools on the Alexin estate already, and even rare materials were easy enough for him to afford. 

Something about the transfer magic just kept him away, and for years, he always found something more important to do. It was only when he felt the beginnings of arthritis after particularly intense sparring sessions that he realized he probably needed something more if he wanted to provide the same sort of instruction to his own son that he’d provided to the Alexin family for the last few years. 

Before he started, though, Simon did some experimentation on small farm animals and noted that lesser life transfer was nearly as powerful but less euphoric than nothing but a pure word of transfer. He was unable to determine if it was more or less powerful, though, because both lesser words killed chickens and goats, and he was unwilling to test if on ne’er do wells, or even his beloved donkey, Daisy the Third. 

Eventually, he was ready. So, using the same techniques he’d learned in the forbidden forges of the Unspoken, he finally got to work. First, he forged three identical daggers, knowing full well that half of all the blades were rejected for quality issues in the second stage. He carefully tempered and sharpened all of them over the course of several weeks before he did anything remotely magical. 

Once that was done, he carefully drew the inverse of the symbols on the blade in inert clay. The pattern he’d chosen was complex but not ridiculously slow. It has a trigger point on the tip so that it would activate whenever it stabbed into something living. To that circuit, he added the words of lesser life transfer. 

Then, when it was masked appropriately, he soaked the thing in acid overnight. The next day, he found that his efforts were in vain and that he would have to start again. Though most of the marks were fine, one of the seconds of clay had come loose, marring the lesser word that was now etched on one side of the blade. 

After the failure, he hammered that blade into unrecognizable uselessness, and then he started again. The second result was much better than the first, and Simon spent a few days carefully gilding and polishing it before he started to carve the handle and fit it to a pommel and crossguard. He might have lavished a month on clever designs. The idea certainly appealed to him, but not as much as the idea of keeping a low profile, at least in some regards. 

In the end, his only effort at artistry was to carve a skull into the pommel as a small memento mori. After that, he tested the thing. For this, at least, he went into the mountains until he found evidence of a beastman tribe. Then, he hunted them until he found a group of two of the creatures alone. The first one he slew quickly, only grazing it with his new dagger once for a noticeable jolt of life force. 

The monster’s friend wasn’t so lucky. Once Simon was faced with only a single foe, he took his time, and he used his sword only to parry the creature’s weapon. He wasn’t trying to torture the beast or anything, but he wanted to know just how potent the life-drain effect was. 

This sure would be easier if I could see damage numbers above his head every time I struck him, he sighed as he inflicted a death of a thousand cuts on the monster. In the end, it took six stabs with the knife to drop it to the ground where it lay, bleating weakly. After that, Simon plunged the knife into the thing's back and felt the energy flow through that bloody link for several seconds before the creature finally stilled. 

In the end, there were too many variables for him to know for sure. He wasn’t sure how long beastmen lived and how much of the fatal damage was done by the blade rather than the magic in it, but Simon felt like each stab had gotten several minor words worth of power back from the creature, but not quite a full word.

That means what? Two or three weeks' worth of life per stab? He thought on the way back. Maybe four months altogether?

Simon thought that was very interesting. For two or three hunting trips like this a year, he might never age again. It seemed ridiculous, but he could find no fault in the logic. Well, only one, at least. 

At the moment, he hadn’t noticed the terrible euphoria building one stab at a time. It only wore off while he slept that night, and in the morning, he felt a terrible craving he hadn’t felt in a long time. That both annoyed and disturbed him because he hadn’t felt any similar cravings when he’d been testing the blade on farm animals. That complicated things, and he vowed to leave the blade in its sheath until he determined if it was the dose or the type of victim that caused him to feel like this. 

Simon took that as his cue to leave. He gave his patron little notice. He just packed up his most prized possessions, left a note for Bertrand regarding a few unfinished projects if the boy wanted a challenge, and then approached Lord Alexin for a letter of recommendation. 

“You’re leaving us already, Master Ennis? What have we done to deserve the shoddy treatment?” the man asked. “I’ll double your wages again if that’s what it will take to keep you a good while longer.”

Money, of course, was no object to either of them, but this was all part of the dance when it came to his patrons. They all wanted a famous, talented artist in their pocket that they could show off to their friends and enemies alike. At this point, half of Simon’s job involved attending parties and sounding wise. 

He refused the man, of course, insisting, “I’ve heard that the queen will soon be selecting a tutor for the young prince. I am to shape the future of the nation. Should she reject me, I will return in due time.”

“Oh, well, then we shall just consider this a vacation,” he mused. “A loan to the queen until you come back here to continue your great works.”

Simon laughed at that. Lord Alexin’s youngest children were already almost as old as Bertrand was when Simon started here, and his eldest son was an artist with a growing reputation in his own right. Simon had done everything he needed to here, and he doubted that he’d ever be back.

Ch. 198 - Worth the Wait

Simon’s trip south gave him only one chance to experiment with his blade, and that was against a group of drunken mercenaries that took him for a helpless old man. Though he didn’t kill all of them because they weren’t bandits or worse, he did take the fingers on one man’s right hand, and he cut the pectoralis major and latissimus dorsi muscles on the other man’s dominant arm when he took him under the arm pit, ensuring he’d never be able to fight again either.

He left both men bleeding and crippled but alive. He also learned that a single dose of life force, even from a human, wasn’t enough to make him fiend for more. That was good but also troubling. 

“So let’s say I can stab someone twice without feeling like I need another hit tomorrow,” he told himself. “That’s just enough for one word of power or enough to counteract a month of natural aging. That means I’d need to fight all the time to keep from getting old.”

Or I’ll need to build up a tolerance so I can drain more energy on the occasions where an opportunity presents itself, he added belatedly. 

Realistically, the only way he’d be able to keep up with the way he used magic, even sparingly, would be to lead a very bloody existence. While he’d certainly done that in the past, in lives where he’d participated in Brin’s civil war or fought against the centaurs at Crowvar, he didn’t expect that he’d suddenly be plunged into anything similar in this life. One thing he knew for sure was that he didn’t want all of his lives from now on to be bloodbaths, even if he eventually died of old age now and then as a result. 

Still, he had a long time to think about all of these issues and more on his long walk south. Along the way, he visited with Niko and met his old apprentice’s young family and admired some of the other works of art he’d painted years before, but mostly, he mulled things over. He thought about what he should do with his next life, he thought about where his evil twin had ended up, and most of all, he thought about how he was going to handle reunification with Elthena and so much time with a son. 

My son, he repeated, almost disbelievingly. He’d painted several large murals of the boy, but he’d never seen him. Truthfully, Simon had never even imagined he’d become a father. Not even after he and Freya had almost had a family of their own. Such an idea was too painful to be allowed to be anything but a distant dream. 

It wasn’t painful now, though. Despite his initial trepidation, his heart grew lighter and lighter as he approached Ionar, and by the time he reached the city itself, the day of his son’s eighth birthday was drawing near. 

Simon had himself a fine new toga sewed for the occasion and spent those last few weeks hobnobbing with the city's elites as he put his reputation to use. Though he never presented himself to court, by the day of the audience, his name was on the lips of everyone who mattered. It felt strange for him to seek out attention like this, but it was what needed to be done. The Queen said she would choose him, but he knew better than anyone the Queen did not always have the final say in these things, not when she had to think about the opinions of her advisors. 

When the day finally arrived, and he presented himself to the court, he was one of dozens of faces that were there seeking the role. Some of them he’d heard of, but most were opportunists. They were simply men eager for the fame or the salary that would come with working for the royal family. Simon strove for neither, but then, at least according to their words, neither did they. 

Simon had expected other applicants. That did not bother him, though he was slightly disappointed that Seyom wasn’t there in person for him to see. 

All the other men had flowery words about public service and young minds in the brief speech each of them was presented to make. Simon largely eschewed that. Instead, lavishing himself with elaborate praise, he let his accomplishments speak for himself. “I am Ennis of Coramin. I need no introduction. I have tutored Lord Alexin’s children and created many public works of art. You may see them and judge them for yourself if you wish to know me better.”

“Thank you, Master Ennis,” the Queen said when he was done. “I have seen the mural that you did in Thebian, of Seyom and I. It was quite lovely.”

He, of course, bowed at that but said nothing else. Instead, he simply studied the aging beauty on the throne. The Queen had gray hairs of her own now and more than a few smile lines around her mouth, but that didn’t make him love her any less. Not after all these years. 

After that, he endured another pack of introductions, each of which was longer than the last, before they were finally permitted the next portion of the very public ceremony. Slowly but surely, the field was winnowed as each of the would-be teachers were themselves tested by nobles with standing in the city. 

The results ranged from impressive to humorous, depending on who it was that asked a question and how hard it was to achieve the answer. The assembled men of learning were made to do complex math problems and explain how they did them as if they were speaking to a young child. If they failed to get the correct answer, or they got the correct answer but explained it in such a way that a child could not grasp it, they were escorted out of the grand hall. 

Simon was never the best at math, so he felt fortunate that the good people of Ionia had never invented anything more difficult than simple geometry and basic algebra, so everything was within his abilities, more or less. The explanation portion, though, was where he really excelled. It turned out that spending years teaching children made you good a pretending to teach to imaginary children, and Simon’s response for how one would calculate the perimeter of a circle received a smattering of applause when he was finished. 

The oratory portion and the art portions gave him even less trouble. He read a poem about the Queen’s grandfather and the great curse, which was apropos, though he did not let on to his cynicism there. That section only took out a few men who were poor public speakers, but combined with the math, there were only half a dozen remaining applicants left for a very public art project.

Each of them was given an easel with fine paper, charcoal, and an hour and told to draw whatever they liked. Simon had to think about it only for a moment before he started putting charcoal to paper and skillfully blending it to create the sketch of the work he’d planned. With only an hour there was only so much to do, even after all these years he held the image so clearly in his mind that he felt like he was halfway done before everyone else had done more than sketch the barest outlines.

There were many things he could draw that would let Elthana know that it was him as if there was any doubt, but there was only one that was perfect for this moment. It was a place that only the two of them had seen. And as the minutes ticked by, he sketched out the tiny cloud city of the oracle, one stroke at a time. The wispy clouds along the rim were easiest, and after that came the still lake in the center and the city proper. When their hour was declared up, he wasn’t quite done with all the terraced fields that lined the rim, but he was close.  

The end result wasn’t even close, as far as he was concerned. To a man, every other applicant had drawn either Seyom in a way that made him look less like a boy and more like a young demigod or Queen Elthena as she might have looked when she was a little younger and prettier. He knew that she would hate all of those.

Still, she pretended to appreciate them and gave all the other men praise as she walked around the hall judging the results. “What is this place then?” she asked when she reached him. 

“It is, at least according to the sages, the place where the oracle dwells,” he admitted. “No one but the Kings and Queens of the realm might go there, of course, but this is how I see it when I read the myths and legends.”

She said nothing to his response and walked on, but he saw her eyes tear up briefly and knew his art had found its mark. When it was all said and done, she allowed three contenders to stay, including him. Then, she allowed the court to debate the issue for a time. 

Simon felt certain he was the front-runner and that all he had to do was bide his time and politely answer further questions. Still, when one of the local Lords loudly complained, “A boy who will one day be King should not be educated by an artist. It will give him too many feminine sensibilities.”

“Who would you suggest that he be trained by then?” Simon asked amiably. 

“He already has one mother,” the man proclaimed, causing a few laughs. “I say he does not need a second one. Let him be trained by some retired general. Or perhaps a nobleman that has served in the army.”

“Our prince will doubtlessly need to know how to fight,” Simon agreed. “The world is a dangerous place. How is your skill with a blade, sir?”

“Impeccable,” the lord proclaimed, striking a pose as the rest of the court started to wonder exactly where this was leading. 

“Excellent,” Simon said. “Duel me then, and we shall ensure that the future is in good hands.”

There was a long silence then, before the man finally croaked, “Excuse me?”

“I said, you require that Prince Seyom’s skill with a sword to be a priority, therefore, let me, or any of the other candidates for his teacher dual you, as a final test.”

This made the Queen lean forward in interest, but she said nothing. Instead, the man said, “Well, surely there are other people who are better equipped to—”

“Do not change your mind now, good sir,” Simon insisted. “Not in front of all these fine Lords and Ladies, lest they confuse your pragmatism for cowardice. Surely, you are not afraid of one old artist.”

That was the push the noble needed, and with a look at the Queen, he strode forward and said, “Please, Your Majesty, let me put this charlatan in his place.”

“I’ll allow it, but to the blood or the surrender only. There is nothing here worth dying for,” she said mildly, gesturing for one of her guards to lend me his sword. “We shall consider this the final test then. If good master Ennis prevails, he can be my son’s tutor. The other learned men will, of course, be allowed to challenge him in turn afterward if he’s so confident.”

Simon repressed the sarcastic thank-you he almost gave her for that second part. Instead, the floor cleared, offering the two fighters wide birth as Simon and his opponent moved to the center of the floor and loosened up. For his part, Simon pretended to be stiff and inexperienced with the type of blade he’d been given, but that was just to make the show that was going to happen next that much better. 

He could tell from the first few moves that his noble opponent had made that the man had studied dueling in his youth but had done little with it in the remainder of his very important life. He’d certainly never fought in a war or killed a man. 

When the duel started, the noble came out quick and hard, hoping to end this quickly. Simon stayed just out of reach, parrying only now and then as he led the man around the room by his nose for half a minute to get the measure of him. Still, he waited for him to get frustrated and shout, “Strange behavior for one who insisted on this battle.”

That was when Simon struck. He didn’t even move too fast. He just lasted out with a series of blows to force his opponent on the defensive. Then, when the man’s pommel was where Simon wanted it to be, he struck it instead, disarming him immediately as his blade soared through the air.

Simon had meant to catch it and end up with both blades, but his angle was off, and the thing went wide. Drama aside, his blade was still pressed against his opponent's neck when it was done, and the applause that followed was raining down on him, not on the humiliated noble who had been talking such a big game. 

Simon immediately offered both other prospective teachers the opportunity to fight him. “You can come at me together if that would make you feel more comfortable,” he offered, though they both hastily declined. 

After that, there was nothing left for him to do but accept the Queen’s offer, meet his son, and settle into his new life, or at least what was left of it.