Creusus's Arc

Chapter 5 of 21

The point lifted and Creusus moved. He shifted off the line as the knight brought the sword down in a heavy overhand cut. The blade came fast and straight, no wrist flick, no false start. Creusus rolled his shoulder past it and felt the wind of the steel against his ribs. He came up outside the knight's sword arm and threw a short hook at the gorget. His knuckles skipped off the black plate and stung all the way to his elbow. The knight was already turning. The second cut came down the same way. So did the third. Creusus stopped trying to hit and started trying to read. Every strike began at the shoulder and ended at the sand. Heavy. Downward. Readable. He could see each one leaving the helm's shadow before it moved. That was the trick, and it was not a kind trick. Reading the strike did not make the strike safe. The knight had picked one pattern and dared him to solve it inside a ring the width of a stall floor. Creusus rolled under the fourth cut and felt the blade pass a hand above his skull. He rolled under the fifth and his knee scraped chalk. He was giving ground again. The tiers above the arena had gone quiet the way a crowd goes quiet when it thinks it knows the ending. Creusus set his back foot and told himself the next cut, he would step in instead of out. He did not step in. The sword came down. He rolled. The tip caught the top of his forearm as he came up, a graze so light he only felt the metal itself, cold, the way a razor feels before the blood. The hair on his arm went with it. No cut. No sting. Just the touch of the edge and gone. His whole body rang. Not the arm. All of him, the base of the skull, the teeth, the soles of his feet inside his boots. He had felt this before. He knew he had felt this before and could not say where. The squire in the first bout. The wave of force when the boy vanished with his armor. That same low hum sitting inside his bones now, like a bell that had been struck days ago and never stopped. Creusus stumbled back two steps and kept his hands up. The knight did not press. The knight raised the sword to the shoulder again, the same starting mark, patient. Creusus stared at the plume and the empty visor and understood what he had learned. The pattern was not the weapon. The blade was. And the blade was doing something to him that had nothing to do with cuts. He had survived the round. He had also been touched, and being touched had cost him something he could not yet count.