The Blood Mirror

Thing had gone downhill from there.

Tisis had come along. With a healer. As a noblewoman, Tisis had already had a basic education in battlefield medicine—or, as it was otherwise known, how to stop your child’s bleeding if no slaves are around to help.

She’d agreed to stay with Evie Cairn, the healer.

Kip counted it a win.

He was no longer a young man.

The skimmer cut up the broad river in the moist evening air. As they’d slowly gained elevation over the past days, the jungles had yielded to evergreen forests.

“Kip, you know, I can learn,” she said.

“Learn to what?” he asked.

“To fight.”

“Of course you can. And we’ll brush up on your shooting and some basic attacks with green. But you’ll never be a match for any of these guys. Even if you could, we don’t have ten years for you to train to get there. It doesn’t make sense to even try—”

Ben-hadad cleared his throat and said under his breath, “I think you’re missing the point, brother.”

Kip charged ahead. Fucking fuck. This was so simple. It wasn’t a matter of feelings. It was a matter of facts. “Look! I’ve been training with the best for more than a year now. Every day we worked for hours to learn how to fight this way. Every day. We’ve been in numerous battles, and I’m still the weakest of us. I’m still a liability to the Mighty, Tisis, so—”

“That’s really not correct,” Ferkudi said.

“Ferk,” Cruxer said. He was working one of the reeds.

“Sure, in a fistfight any of us could take him,” Ferkudi went on, “but battle’s not a fistfight. Breaker, you don’t need to be modest. I don’t think any of us would want to face you one-on-one on the field of battle.”

“Orholam’s chapped nutsack, Ferkudi,” Big Leo said from the other reed. “You’re not wrong, but your timing is.”

“My timing is what?” Ferkudi asked.

“Wrong.”

“Oh, I thought you were leaving me hanging there, like, ‘You’re not wrong, but your timing is…’”

“Ferk,” Cruxer said in a tone of command that was a twin of Commander Ironfist’s.

“Ah. Right, sir.”

“You see?” Tisis said. “I need to do my part.”

“I thought we’d already agreed what your part is!” Kip said, starting to get hot again.

Ben-hadad cleared his throat again, looking blithely at the sky and trees. “Missing the point,” he whispered again.

“Fine!” Kip said, too loudly, turning to the young man. “What’s the point, Ben?”

Ben-hadad abandoned his quiet tone, matching Kip’s frustration with his own. “She wants your respect, dumbass. You treat her like dead weight and it robs her of purpose. I understand how she feels.”

He gestured to his knee. Ben-hadad did little stretches every day to reclaim what movement he could, but the kneecap had been shattered, and every move caused him terrible pain. He used one crutch most of the time, and two when he had to move at any decent speed. “But hell, add the cripple and the neophyte together, and you might get one warrior between us.” Bitterness roiled beneath the surface of his words like cream first poured into kopi, awaiting a single slight stir to stain every part.

“We need two drafters on the reeds to keep the skimmer mobile if we have to retreat,” Cruxer interjected. “It’s a necessary function. Plus Ben-hadad’s a helluva shot if it comes to it. Tisis, you stay with Ben.”

Tisis swallowed and nodded. “Okay.”

“That’s ‘Yes, sir,’” Cruxer said, with a little smirk. “You’re one of the Mighty now.”

Tisis lit up. “Yes, sir!” she said. “And sorry for being a jackass, everyone.”

“Common malady ’round here,” Big Leo muttered.

Ferkudi stared over at him.

“Universal malady?” Big Leo asked.

“Huh?” Ferkudi asked. “I was just—you’ve got a booger.”

Big Leo trailed off into cursing Ferkudi under his breath and trying to dig at his nostril discreetly while the others grinned.

“Universal,” Kip said. “Definitely universal.” He turned to Cruxer with gratitude welling up in him. Sometimes you just needed a guy to step in and assert some authority. Cruxer was so good at that. Many in power liked to assert their dominance. Cruxer liked to let people figure things out for themselves, intervening only if there was a problem he could fix that they couldn’t fix on their own. It was one of many traits that made him a good man to follow. “Thank you… Commander Cruxer.”

“Commander?” Cruxer asked.

“If we’re going to do this, let’s do it right, right?” Kip asked.

Cruxer stood up straight, as if donning a new cloak and feeling the weight of it settle on his shoulder. “Commander Cruxer,” he said. A big smile spread over his face.

“Commander Cruxer,” Winsen said, nodding to him, not even a hint of sarcasm in his tone.

“Commander Cruxer,” Big Leo said in his basso profundo as if announcing him in a stadium.

And on they went, each adding their own little twist.

“Commander Cruxer?” Ferkudi asked.

“Commander Cruxer,” Ben-hadad said.

Tisis fluttered her eyelashes and clasped her hands like a swooning girl. “Oh, Commander Cruxer.”

He blushed and they laughed together.

Kip suddenly felt far, far away. After all they’d been through, and what he knew he was taking them into, it was a honeyed moment that they could be silly kids together. Like a spark flying upward, their youth was bright and fading fast.

“It’s time,” Ben-hadad said, abruptly professional. He’d made water clocks for them, complaining about it. He’d not had time to make their globes the correct size to correspond to hours or minutes. Instead he’d merely made the two clocks exactly the same size, so although it took about seventy minutes for them to empty rather than an hour, they were still synchronized with each other, which was all that mattered.

Kip drew his superviolet spectacles from his hip case, absorbed light, and shot a flare into the sky. It had taken them a while to figure out how to keep the flare from disintegrating immediately, superviolet was so fragile.