The Ghost Tiger's Lament

Chapter Eight

Blood sprays through the air, following the arc of a gleaming sword.

A man is singing.

“In the wild is a dead doe; there does she lie, covered in white rushes. There is a lady, heart touched with spring...”

“That. Is a terrible song.”

Zsaran’s voice, between gasps for air, somewhere off to her side.

The man laughs in response, a rich, resonant sound, discordant against the gurgled cries of the dying and the incoherent shouts of men in the distance.

Ashne adjusts the grip on her sword. A warning or reprimand teeters on the tip of her tongue. But she swallows it, thrusts her blade forward.

Tonight they are unstoppable. Fire rushes through her veins, and she dances with her beloved Shenkes as if she is flying, daring their enemies to cut her down from the very heavens.

A misstep: she stumbles. An enemy dagger-axe swings down, but she is not afraid. She rolls away, springing back to her feet. The axeman falls forward, head rolling away from a wickedly curved blade; she looks up to see the mercenary, the ragged scar across his handsome face, the gold hoops in his ears glinting in the moonlight, his dark eyes fever-bright and merry.

“Careful there,” he says with a swift, predatory grin.

“Thank you,” she replies, but already he is leaping away, slashing a swathe through a knot of reinforcements, and somewhere far away she can hear Zsaran laughing, howling back verses of her own.

In her mind she pictures her: the shadow of her back enveloped in smoke, her hair loose upon her shoulders, caught in the breeze. Like a crow perched upon the railing of a bridge, wings spread.

The last refrains of the song echo through the clearing, heavily accented. “‘Ah, touch not my girdle, good sir! Let not your hound bark!’”

They are no longer in the clearing. But by a river, still earlier, its banks strewn with the dead and dying.

Zsaran grins, her arms splattered in blood and guts. “Not so bad after all, are you, mercenary?”

He eyes the sword at his throat and grins back. “High praise coming from you, river woman.”

Zsaran laughs and laughs. “What is your price?”

“He’s dangerous,” says Ashne.

“All the better!”

“He cannot be trusted.”

“Better the enemy you know.”

But that is precisely the problem, she begins to protest.

And suddenly they are gathered by the campfire: she tending the coals, Zsaran sprawled at her side, the mercenary drinking from his gourd, the red mare dozing on her feet.

“I think you will find that I am no deer,” Zsaran is saying, a sly smirk upon her face.

“No,” agrees the mercenary. “Your fangs are too sharp. As is your tongue.”

A raised eyebrow. “This, coming from the man with a serpent’s tongue?”

“Ah, you say that only because you do not know all the tricks a serpent’s tongue is capable of.”

Ashne sits in silence, distracted, listening idly to their banter. Pure silliness, whispers a voice from somewhere deep down inside, and yet perhaps it is precisely because of how silly it was that she remembers this moment so vividly.