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Her sword sang as she pulled it from her belt and turned herself around. The fabric of her cloak whipped against his side but he moved with her. Two people stood between them and the town. Two horribly familiar people.
The Maine twins, Corman & Mavis.
Remis was sure his luck couldn’t get any worse.
“Well, look who we found, Mavis,” Corman sang. He smiled in time with his twin.
“Just the man we’ve been looking for,” Mavis sang back.
Great.
“You know these people?” Meira snapped but didn’t lower her sword.
Remis shrugged. The Maine family twins were the brats of their biggest competitor on the market. He’d met them a time or two at functions that his father had demanded he appear at, though he’d often found them unsettling when they constantly mirrored the other. They were both as ghostly pale as their wraith-like mother with her bland gray eyes but had the sharpness of their father’s features and the same curling red hair. Both currently had a blistering crimson sunburn across their cheeks and forehead. They’d never been known as people who spent a lot of time outdoors and it could be that their excessively fair features were exactly why. He almost pitied them. Almost. It was hard to find it within himself when they stood here in the taunting way of theirs.
“I know of them,” he said, answering Meira.
“Got yourself,” Mavis started.
“An escort?” Corman finished.
Meira’s face twisted. She looked as appalled as he’d been the first time they’d ever spoken to him like that. The twins both had their hands on their own weapons and dried leaves crunched under their boots as they began to separate and circle him and Meira.
He didn’t like that. Not a bit.
He gripped the hilt of his sword.
“Less of an escort,” Remis smiled brightly with that ever-charming mask he wore, “more of a kidnapper.” Meira chafed at that but was following Mavis with the point of her sword giving Remis her back. He let himself do the same, found comfort in her warmth as it aligned with his. “Is there something we can help you with?”
Mavis and Corman laughed in unison. Spoke in unison. “Father told us you’d been sent off to procure some business. We’ve been sent to keep you from said business. By any means necessary.”
Corman stopped directly in front of him, cocked his head to the side, and grinned. Remis imagined Mavis looked much the same before Meira as he felt her tense behind him. Metal whispered as it was pulled from sheaths and then clanged together as Remis and Corman stood sword to sword. Meira growled.
“We don’t have to do this.” Remis’ smile was falling, but Corman’s was still growing.
“Yes we do,” Mavis answered though he hadn’t been talking to her. The oddness of the two sent a terrible cold chill down his spine.
“I’ll give you sixty seconds to make the right choice here,” Meira said loud enough for Corman to hear too. Damn it all, her voice had gone dark and dangerous, shooting through him so violently his knees threatened to go weak. He wished he could have seen her face when she continued, he knew it held all that fire that she liked to point his way. That fire that made him want to bend to her will. “But if you so much as touch him, I’ll run you both through with my sword and leave you for the dragonis.”
Her words were rough, a rumble of frustration and…fear? The sound of it filled his chest with a new sort of sensation. A light but warm caress that took the breath from his lungs.
“I’d listen to her,” he said. “She’s more dangerous than her pretty looks suggest.”
Corman only rolled his eyes and lunged. Remis met him with his own blade and batted away the strike. They fell into the familiar push and pull of swordplay, the one that both their parents had made sure they were fluent in. It was different having an opponent that might actually hurt him though, there was that lingering sense of worry at the back of his mind. Corman didn’t pull his strikes like Remis’ trainers had, and the first time Corman broke Remis’ guard and his blade cut across his bicep he almost didn’t believe it was real.
The sting of pain that followed jolted him into reality and renewed his anger. He surged forward pushing Corman back toward the treeline and off the beaten dirt path. Challenge shone in Corman’s eyes, and a grin still teased at his lips.
At his back, Remis could hear Mavis’ grunting as she took the wicked swing of Meira’s sword. Corman’s gaze wandered to his sister long enough for Remis to get his own strike. His blade glided across Corman’s ribcage, splitting open his shirt and revealing the pale flesh darkened by blood.
He realized as Corman jumped away and crimson started to soak the edges of the frayed fabric that to end this might mean he’d have to actually kill the man. Remis had learned the art of swinging his sword but he’d never considered he’d actually have to use it to end someone’s life. He wasn’t a soldier. He wasn’t a killer. If anything, judging by how the thought made his stomach turn and bile burn at the back of his throat, he was a coward wearing the mask of a man with confidence. He didn’t want to kill Corman no matter how awful he might be.
Maybe Corman took pity on him or it could have been that he knew his sister was struggling against Meira but the man backed away and ran for his sister. Remis let him. He followed the man with the end of his sword but made no move to hurt him when he very well could have.
Then he and Meira were side by side. Her nostrils flared as she caught sight of his torn sleeve and the cut that ran across it. She snarled, bared her teeth at the twins, and in a flurry of movements he’d hardly been able to catch flung herself in front of him.
Meira was a storm that raged when she met Corman’s sword. The man gasped as he struggled to hold her back. She spun with lethal precision, knocking his blade from his hands, blocking Mavis’ next attempt, and finally shoving her blade straight through Corman’s stomach.
Eyes wide, he watched Meira, barely keeping a hold of his own weapon as his body was drenched in cold sweat. She stepped closer to Corman and shoved her weapon deeper as he groaned. Mavis was screaming too, holding her stomach as though she’d been the one hit.
