Headless Over Heels ch 2.33 - The Harlequin (Patreon)

They met at midday outside the city walls, the two duelists, on a hill whose name—Swordsman’s Knoll—made its lineage for the event obvious. The great oak beneath which they stood was covered with knuckles and knotted-over scars.

Around them, a semicircle of sable-wearing observers. Some were gossips or gadflies drawn by the promise of Legion blood. Some were fellow officers to judge by their badges and sashes and frogging. One was Lisa, who as a duelist’s Exark was not allowed to stand close. Presumably that ox-shouldered man with the mustache and the sour expression was Leonane’s Exark. Seth had thought it might be Desdemona, had scanned the crowd for her spidery frame, but that wasn’t possible, Ofelia had told him; Leonane was part of the Legionnaire corps and she was a Verdugo. Whatever patronage she offered was informal and whatever loyalty he gave back was purely suck-uppery.

Leonane al Proiet had brought a finely balanced saber whose basket hilt gleamed with orchard-leaf flourishes. The blade’s flat was etched in jade with a dozen al Proiet names along its silvery span, and as he turned it the light caught its mirror and refracted it into a blinding white penstroke upon the world, a work of military calligraphy as much art as weapon.

Tiago had brought his sword.

Dispassionately he undid the drawstring on the field coat and doffed his bicorne. This cluster of felt and brocade he handed off to his silent sister, who waited nearby as his second.

Leonane’s second was one of his hyenas. In passing off his coat and cap, the Lanzcapitan whispered something just below hearing that set them back into boyish laughing again.

Something strange: Tiago laughed too, beneath his breath, like a private joke. Leonane’s face went cold.

“Let us dispatch and be done, Teniyant,” he said. “I have more pressing matters than sparing the wounded pride of your provincials.”

“Yes,” Tiago said. “Let’s.”

The judge for this affair, a man with a capitan’s fringe cassock and a head as bald and shiny as a cueball, bellowed in impressive baritone that sent shushes and jostles into the crowd: “Bring forth the basin of Saint Savua.”

Tiago paced the hill to where his retinue—such as it was—had gathered. A slimmer group than Leonane’s knuckle-dragging fraternity: just Seth and Ofelia, and Riccana standing behind them. “I’m sorry for all this,” Tiago said to her. “For dragging your name into it.”

“I’ll wait to accept your apology until the duel is over, goodman, if you pardon,” Riccana said.

“Why’s that, madam?”

“Because an apology from a man who challenged and lost differs from that of a man who fed that prick his teeth.”

Tiago chuckled.

“In the stories the maidens do this thing where they hand the man a handkerchief,” Riccana said. “But I usually use my sleeve, to be honest. Don’t have one.”

“Me neither.” Tiago held up his forearm. Riccana bumped hers against it.

Ofelia gave Seth a meaningful nudge. He returned a yes, I’m seeing it type of look.

“Teniyant al Ydris, sir,” a woman called from the crowd. A pretty Sektoric, tall and thundrously browed, with a plaited sideshave and a bicorne under her arm. “I will be watching your off-hand. I imagine Lanzcapitan al Proiet will do the same. They are a tell, sir.”

“It’s been a long year since you saw me, Teniyant,” Tiago said. “Your intelligence is stale.”

“You’ve learned, then, to keep from those ugly gesticulations?”

Tiago smiled coldly. “Perhaps a demonstration, Madam.”

Her responding smile was at absolute zero. “Perhaps.”

“Who’s that?” Riccana whispered to Ofelia. Was it Seth’s imagination or did she look put off?

“Teniyant Chondra il Aphaz,” Ofelia whispered back. “A goddamned prodigy, I’m afraid. The only soldier in the Teniyant class with a valid claim on outmatching my brother, not that they’ve ever fought. I despise her, as is my sisterly duty, but also I am agonizingly attracted to her.”

“A truly star-crossed affair,” Seth noted.

“It certainly would be,” Ofelia said. “If she so much as knew my name.”

“You don’t think so?” Seth asked.

“Chondra pays precious little attention to anything that isn’t swords or swordspersons.”

“Surely you count as a swords-adjacent person, at least.”

“I use them now and then,” Ofelia said. “I have never pleasured myself at the imagining of one, as Chondra and Sunshine have.”

“If my nemesis had a sister, I would definitely get with her as a mind game,” Seth said.

“A strategy pale in effectiveness compared to their mother, surely,” Ofelia said, which finished that exchange.

“May the cooling waters of Saint Savua’s discipline temper the heat of this disagreement,” the saintspeaker intoned, thin arms trembling somewhat under the heavy-bottomed marble bowl she’d carted up Swordsman’s Knoll. “That by her grace and the grace of her brother Saint Silas comvel egytmak preliyazikonflict, and fellowship be drawn in the blood of the conflict.” She held forth the basin. Clear water sloshed within. “Salutiy.”

“Salut, oratiyant,” the duelists said, in canticle unison.

Tiago dipped his sword into the crystal water. The tremors in the basin’s surface cast their reflection across his solemn face like pale smoke. He stepped away and nodded to Lanzcapital Leonane, who took the same slow sacred moment—though he was gnawing his lip, and his eyes lit back and forth from the surface of the water to his patient opponent.

The moment Leonane paced back to his spot, Tiago drew the blade up sharply to a vertical between his eyes that set drops coruscating from the strip of metal. “Salut, Exark,” he called to Lisa, who responded only with an icy tilt of her chin, though Seth could tell even from this distance that there was a smile in her eyes.

With a brisk thwip Tiago’s swordpoint lanced outward across the ten-span gap between him and his foe. His slim fingers were loose and light around the well-worn hilt. “Salut, soldat,” he said. “May your mocking tongue be stilled.”

Proiet pointed his own blade out. For all the nerves he’d shown, its curved tip was still as a gravepost. “Salut, soldat,” he said. “May your pretense be punctured.”

Leonane’s second squinted at Ofelia. “Salut, secondi. May your house be humbled.”

“Salut, secondi, and et cetera,” Ofelia said.

And that, apparently, was that, because then a silence fell upon the hill.

A roosting buglebird let out its gossamer hoot. A breeze murmured across the tassels on Tiago’s belt, his unkempt hair, the ribbon in Leonane’s braid, the tails on the coats of the watchers, the rustling oak that oversaw them.

Tiago’s hand slid behind his back like the beginning of a bow or a mummer’s impression of a butler.

Leonane’s drifted out to his side, as if he was about to mount a tightrope.

Tiago’s lead foot slid forward.

Leonane took one slow step left.

Tiago matched him.

Leonane’s elbow tucked in, then extended his sword tip into a lecturer’s point.

Tiago rotated his wrist a half-turn.

Leonane pounced low and the blade sprung out like a scorpion’s lash and Tiago’s foot slid a neat handspan to one side (just like his mother, that same detached economy) and his blade spun down like a descending comet and Leonane met him with a cymbal-crash clang that battered both sabers out of line and he threw a cut straight to Tiago’s gut which Tiago caught in a whirling parry into a quickstepping thrust to Leonane’s wrist which Leonane twisted his guard to catch, but the saber’s bite skipped upward, a flicking feint that sent its spur toward Leonane’s gritted jaw and he jolted away, arms scarecrow-wide with the exertion, an ungraceful step backward that Tiago matched and dealt another flashing halfmoon swipe—a moulinet, damn him, he’d told Seth that was just for showing off, and there it was—and Leonane carried it through and counterthrusted with a zealous “HA,” but the blades bound, a hellacious carving clatter as span locked across span, then Tiago was away again, and his sword spiraled back to its cantilever straightness.

Leonane’s gravity rolled from heel to toe to center.

And they were still again, as statues.

Seth exhaled the breath he’d drawn before either man had moved. The whole exchange had been as quick as the space between heartbeats.

A smattering of applause from the ravenclad observers. Lisa’s broad hands boomed unmistakably; whistling was seemingly disallowed, or Seth was sure he’d be hearing that, too.

Tiago’s arm canted upward, the saber smoothly pivoting along its tip like a shadow around a fixed sundial. His chest rose slowly and fell again.

Riccana leaned forward, tongue trapped between her teeth, fists screwed shut.

Seth tried to read the fight, to remember Tiago’s instruction. That was a hanging guard, right?

Leonane’s knee bent. His breath was loud enough to hear.

Tiago grinned. A twitch on his face and a brief, breathy heh. He circled his saber in a slow crescent, bringing his elbow below its point, he began to laugh.

Murmurs and movement in the ravenclad crescent around them. “What in hell is he doing?” Seth whispered.

“His hexentat. His second-ringer.” Ofelia’s eyes were glued to her brother. She held his hat before her lips as if speaking into a conch. “Tiago doesn’t use hexentats the way Mother and I do. The Harlequin is his only second-ringer, and he has no third.”

“What’s it do?”

“A stutter-step,” Ofelia said. “It decouples the motion of the wielder’s body and the appearance of that motion. Just for a second, but a second’s all you need in a duel.”

Tiago was laughing louder. Lisa watched placidly, her forefinger laid against the left corner of her lip.

“But there’s a tell,” Ofelia said. “A laugh, the moment you strike. A trained duelist knows to seek it and react off it.”

Seth stared at the cackling swordsman. “Unless you’re laughing the whole time.”

“Exactly.”

“So he’s getting ready to use it?” Seth asked.

“Not on a popmite like Leonane. He relies too hard on its passive. But the threat. It’s keeping Leonane penned in.”

Leonane pounced with unnerving ferocity. A counterclockwise feint surged forth into a lunge that sent him stumbling past his mark. Tiago yanked his arm back and away.

“Touch,” Leonane cried, saber aloft. “Touch!”

Riccana gasped in distress.

Tiago shook with uncontrolled mirth as he held his arm out for the judge. The saintspeaker craned her neck to look over his balding crown. The crowd did the same.

“No blood is drawn,” the judge announced, and scurried backward. “The matter resumes.”

Tiago barked a shrill laugh. “Can’t make me bleed, Leo, you showpony.”

“Shut up,” Leonane growled, dropping his stance back into dueling form.

“You nobody.”

“Shut up.”

“What’s the passive he relies on so much?” Seth asked, as the duelists circled again. Leonane was breathing heavy now, through his mouth, blinking sweat from his eyes. “What does the Harlequin do?”

“It makes you happy,” Ofelia said.

Seth’s brow rose. “What? Like it cheers you up?”

“Yes,” Ofelia said. “Makes you laugh longer and louder, find the joy in things. It puts more color in the world. That’s how Tiago described it once.”

“And he has that?”

“There is something I should tell you about my brother,” Ofelia said. “Something I have told him you’ve earned, and he didn’t disagree. Just sighed. So oh well, I think.”

She paused to watch Tiago snap outward with a picture-perfect lunge, saber punching through the air and tearing past Leonane’s retreating shoulder by inches.

“Come on,” Riccana hissed, loud enough to draw disapproving looks at this inappropriate swordfight behavior.

“Our father’s death wasn’t when it started,” Ofelia said. “But it’s when it became impossible to ignore.”

“What?”

“Whatever was wrong with Tiago,” Ofelia said.

The swords sang again. Clang, rattle, hiss, and they were apart once more. Seth couldn’t track what he was seeing at this point—not with his mind bifurcated.

“Growing up the way he did,” she said. “The way we did. I think it started the first time our…”

She returned her attention to the duel, though nothing was happening but a few probing exchanges and cryptic shifts of stance.

“The first time Kevan hit him,” Ofelia said, “a part of him went away inside. The parts that… felt. He told me once it was like he was reading a story about himself. And he knew what was supposed to be good and what was supposed to be bad. But when he smiled, it was because that’s what you do in stories. There was only one way to bring any emotion off that inert page. The only time he really felt anything—”

Another vicious, explosive exchange. Leonane’s shirt stuck to him, saturated with sweat. His fingers twitched with the resonant blows that came to them from the sword. Tiago cackled like a hyena, darting and dancing, black hair flicking perspiration like crystal through the air. An overhead chop, and another, and another, sprawling Leonane back further and further, and Leonane’s leg shot out in a harried kick across the dirt and Tiago’s flew up and back like a dancer’s, and his sword snapped straight vertical to foil the horizon-sweeping followup Leonane cast in a desperate bid at carving space away from his pursuer, and it didn’t work, it only brought him more out of balance, and Tiago’s laughter shut off like a thrown switch.

He kicked Leonane in the face. Riccana whooped and punched the air.

“—was when he hurt people,” Ofelia said.

“Feel that, Lanzcap?” Tiago danced away from his sprawled-out enemy. “Plainland dirt on your face. Your own fucking patch.”

“Will you declare, sir?” The judge daubed at Leonane’s bleeding mouth with a kerchief. “The blood is not drawn by swordpoint, but it flows.”

“No,” Leonane gasped. A tooth was newly chipped in his wide mouth. “No, I will not declare.”

“Teniyant?”

“Come here, Leo.” Tiago swished his sword like he was hunting butterflies. “Come show the Verdugo’s lickspittle your Legionnaire fury.”

The judge stood and wiped the earth from his cassock’s knee. “It goes on,” he called.

“Never me,” Ofelia said. “And never Mother. That’s how he knew he loved us, even when the piece of him that loves was locked away. But after Mother left, the season she was gone was a hard one to live through. It had been getting worse, and it was worst of all after… after our father was gone. The rest of the village, they were terrified of him. I don’t doubt that if Mother hadn’t come back, he’d have ended up on the scaffold.”

Tiago and Leonane were locked up again. A low slash, slicing upward. A catch and riposte. Something connected between their gazes that sprang Tiago back, in the split second before a carnelian red flame bloomed from between Leonane’s busted lips and caught his billowing sleeve. Tiago ignored it entirely, let it creep up his arm, kept fighting, and laughing, and laughing.

“And then we took him to the Necropolis,” Ofelia said. “And we found out from the people there this wasn’t an uncommon thing. They’d seen its like in veterans of the wars with the seraphs. And Mother met someone who’d had it done herself. And that person paid to give it to Tiago. And he came back.”

A shower of sparks and a calamitous ringing noise. Leonane had thrown it all into a terminal lunge, had left his damn feet in the throwing of it, and where it collided with Tiago it might have fucking run him through but the saber had crashed straight into a stomach turned hard as diamond by the Tortoise’s active.

“HA,” Tiago barked.

“I had my brother back for the first time in years,” Ofelia said. “Thanks to her.”

Tiago whirled. His burning sleeve blazed.

“Who?” Seth asked.

Leonane staggered backward.

“Mother’s first friend in the Necropolis,” Ofelia said. “Desdemona al Vhesse.”

“A touch!” The judge cried. “A touch! Blood drawn by blade!”

Leonane was sitting on the ground, shivering, his hand pinned to his midsection. Wet blackness bloomed beneath his fingers.

Tiago’s laughter ended abruptly, like a waxograph’s needle pulled away. He ripped his burning shirt from his body and threw it into the dewy grass. His corded muscles gleamed beneath the row of hexentatuae on his bicep.

“He never used it.” Seth had to yell it over the upswell of applause and outpouring of emotion. “The Harlequin.”

“He never does,” Ofelia said. “Because then, for an hour, he is what he might have become.” She watched Lisa elbow through the crowd to lift her boy into the air.

Riccana stood frozen at the edge of the crowd, staring at the shirtless defender of her honor.

“I’ve told you his secret,” Ofelia said, as she and Seth delved into the knot of people and the judge’s barking baritone attempted to restore their formality. “So I suppose in recompense I should tell you mine.”

She caught him in the crush and pulled his ear to her lips.

“I’m glad,” she whispered. “That’s my secret. I’m glad Tiago is better, but I’m glad he got sick, too.”

“Why?”

“Because he killed my father,” Ofelia said, and shoved her way through the well-wishers and admirers, to her brother’s side.