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Pushing his tender, pink tongue in with her finger.
Might have.
Heaps and heaps of dead covering the Halfmoon, so thick you couldn’t see stone floor nor seats, just clothes and bodies.
Might have.
The queen struck with an iron pan and vilely treated, one of her priceless neck-pearls rolling on the palace tiles, ignored by slaves mad to abuse and humiliate her.
The princess in her trunk, the sound of it smashed flat by a geigon, a shriek, then just wet crunching.
Kinch, did you damn yourself to the deepest hell in the west?
Might have.
“How did the Bride come to me?” she said. She wasn’t going to let me sidestep this.
“Well, er. It was sort of a group task. You’re hard to kill, you know.”
She just looked at me.
“A gladiator named Apia stabbed you through with a slakesword. Later, a huge fucking goblin headbutted you in the wound and got it bleeding hard. Don’t worry, I killed him.”
She kept looking at me.
“I killed him with this,” I said, showing her the blackglass sword. That distracted her.
“May I hold it?”
“Aye, sure,” I said, offering her the handle. It was a short sword for an Erydoni, but a proper sword for us. The handle would need to be whittled a bit to better fit our wee hands.
She got to her feet gracefully from a full kneel; if she looked like a starving cave hermit, she still moved like the first sword of a Calar Bajat academy. “Bolnu,” she said, testing its weight.
“Stab something with it.”
“Stab what?”
“Anything. The deck of the ship.”
“I do not want to dull it.”
“You won’t.”
She cocked that Galva eyebrow and stabbed down at the hardwood deck, sinking the point a handspan into it where a steel sword might have bit an inch. She nodded, weighed an invisible something in her free hand. That meant very fucking bolnu.
She went to hand it back to me, but I shook my head.
“You’re the swordswoman. You should keep it.”
She narrowed her eyes at me.
“Besides,” I said, “when I stabbed that goblin with it, it sort of went all the way through him and a bit into you. You were grappling.”
She nodded.
“I think that’s the wound that did for you. But like I said.”
“Group task,” we both said at the same time.
