EPIC: Fourteen Books of Fantasy (3 page)

“She was named after her grandmother—don’t change the subject. Now, do you remember what you said?”

He stilled like a rat in a trap. He knew he’d been caught. She knew she had him right where she wanted him. Like she’d planned all along. Sara could have played a game of cards with any man or woman in the tavern that night. But she’d chosen Simon. A terrible player and lousy sport, quick to pull a knife and accuse another of trickery. At first she’d let him win to get his confidence up. When he started to think he couldn’t lose,
then
she took him for all he was worth. She watched now as understanding lit his eyes.

“This was a set-up,” he blustered. “You did this on purpose.”

“Yes,” said Sara. “Now, one last time: What did you say to me three months ago?”

The poor man raised his chin. His fists clenched at his side as his knuckles grew white from the tension. But he knew no matter how far he ran or how fast he was afoot, she would come after him. She wouldn’t stop until he was dead. Her determination was in her eyes. Everyone knew: Sara Fairchild tolerated no one’s belittlement of her family.

He said reluctantly, “I said ‘Your father is a disgrace to this empire. Be glad his blood soaks the land.’”

“Yes, that was it,” Sara said softly, “As a father yourself, you should know this, Simon Codfield—there is no greater love than a daughter bears for her father.”

Before he could move or protest, she threw the dagger that was attached to her thigh and it pierced his throat. He fell to the ground like all of his friends. She walked up to stare down at his body. Sara tilted her head to the side as she noticed that she’d been off by a millimeter. The dagger hadn’t pierced his jugular. As the blood seeped from the wound to pool beneath his head, she knew he’d be dead within a minute. He couldn’t speak with the wound to his throat. As his fingers twitched with the death throes of a man who could barely move, she shrugged and picked up the scimitar at her feet. After wiping it down, she wrestled the scimitar’s carrier off the dead woman’s back. Hefting it carefully, she swung the sheathed scimitar along her back.
 

By that time, Simon Codfield was dead, and she retrieved her dagger from his throat, careful to wipe the blade down on his tunic before putting it back at her thigh.

Without breaking a sweat, she had taken them all on and won.
 

As she sprinted down the alley with her newly acquired scimitar in hand, her well-trained ears caught the groan of the lone thief still left alive in the alley. The muscle man would live to tell the tale of Sara Fairchild another day.

Chapter II

S
ARA
HAD
ONE
THING
ON
her mind while she ran through the streets of Sandrin: getting home quickly. She desperately hoped that the telltale sign of blood wasn’t on her clothes. She’d done her best to avoid blood splatter, always killing cleanly and from a distance, if possible. But blood had the strangest ways of falling. It could splatter, it could spray, or it could shoot out. You never knew which way the blood would flow until the second before you killed a person. Sometimes not even then. She’d grown used to blood ever since her father had taken her to her first executioner’s gallows. She had been twelve. They had executed a man, convicted of raping a child, by guillotine. The fierce joy of the crowd had been unsettling for a still young Sara. But her father had spoken to her long and hard after the crowd had dispersed. He had explained the man’s crime. Had explained that the child the executed man had hurt had suffered for a long time and then died at his hands.
 

“That was why the crowd gloried in his death as a rightful passage. It righted the wrong he had done,” her father had said in his grave voice.
 

Sara had understood her father’s explanation. The death hadn’t bothered her as much as the crowd’s adulation. But even while she stood in her leather boots on the cobblestones stained red with the blood of past executions, it hadn’t been long before she became fascinated by the blood and the sport that went into the killing of one single man.

As far as killings went, that one was tame. But it was the first time that she had seen a person killed alongside her father. The first time Sara had seen life’s blood flow from someone’s veins. The first time she’d seen a head separated from a body. But it wasn’t the last. Because fighting and blood was in her veins. She was a Fairchild, and, more importantly, she was the daughter of Vincent Fairchild, one of the empire’s premier commanders and the man responsible for the most wins in the imperial games for the last fifty years. Before her father had been a commander in the army, he had been a gladiator without peer. One whose tenacity in the ring, ability to defeat the fiercest foe, and calmness when faced with death had beguiled even the most jaded spectator.

As Sara flew down the streets of Sandrin, she thought it was ironic. Ironic that her father, so feared in the arena, had gone placidly to death. Had not resisted the empress’s men as he was led to slaughter.
 

Then she laughed cruelly. “But that was my father. Honorable in the gladiatorial games and honorable in his death. But there was no honor in
why
he died. There is no honor in desertion.”

She nearly spit the last word out as she rushed by the meat pie vendor so fast that she didn’t see it. She smelled the pies but couldn’t stop. She ran. She ran to escape her past and to be removed from the present. She ignored the shouts of cart vendors, of a guard whose horse she startled, and of the urchins still playing in the streets. She ran with tears streaming down her face until she got to her doorstep on a quiet street. Breathing hard, Sara looked down at the pail of water that her mother had left at the door for the stray dogs. She knew she must look a fright. But she couldn’t let her mother see her tears. Every day, Sara defended her father’s memory against foes seen and unseen. She fought in duels in alleys and kept her chin high in the streets. No one could tell her
why
her father had deserted his empress’s cause. She had the scary feeling that even if they could, nothing they said would ease the pain of a daughter whose father had fallen in her eyes.
 

But still she did her best to keep those worries from her mother’s doorstep. Never letting her know what people whispered behind their backs. Sara made sure to
never
let her mother get a hint that her daughter was floundering. Because under Sara’s fierce exterior hardened by battle scars and training, was a young woman facing the harsh backlash of a father’s damned legacy alone. She would never let her mother down. Not like her father had.
 

Sara took a deep breath, splashed water on her face, and wiped away the wetness on her sleeve. Then she opened the door to the smell of baking bread and the sounds of a home where laughter was long gone.

She quickly shut the door behind her and took off her new scimitar to lean it against the wall. Next she took the knife, dagger, and baton from their secure holds on her waist and legs. Those she placed on the ‘weapons table’ her mother had set up. It was the only house rule her mother had in regards to battle magic and the family tendency to fight: No weapons carried to the dinner table. She did, however, allow a long blade in the kitchen for defense and gave Sara her blessing to keep her favorite blades in her room.
 

“Sara?” called her mother, “Is that you?”

“Yeah,” Sara called as she hastily grabbed a cloth from the chair to rub her hands.

“Dinner’s ready.”

“Coming, Ma,” muttered Sara.

She hastily trotted into kitchen, where her mother had set up a rickety wooden table on top of the upside-down washing tub. Seeing the set-up made Sara sad. Not for herself, but for her mother. They had come a long way from their days as the family of the preeminent gladiator and then commander of imperial forces. When her father was executed, the magistrate’s court had stripped her mother of all the land he held in his name as well as his pension from his years as a gladiator. All as further punishment for his unnamed crime.
 

Like being dead wasn’t enough
, Sara thought miserably.

Whatever her father had done to be charged with desertion, then execution, had far-reaching consequences until this day. Her father had died months ago. But Sara and her mother still suffered daily for his crimes. From the torment Sara endured on the streets to the fact that her mother couldn’t retain a job as a wind dancer anymore. None of the companies would hire her. Doors were shut in her face and none had reopened with time.

Her mother looked up from where she knelt praying on the floor. A smile lit up her beautiful face. Smiling herself, Sara walked over to kiss her on the cheek.

“Did you get the meat pies?” whispered her mother.

Sara froze. “I—oh no, I forgot, Mother. I got caught up in some things.”

“Games with your friends?” her mother said happily. She desperately wanted Sara to have a normal life. A normal sense of identity. But that had long since gone.
 

“Yes, with my friends, Ma,” Sara said as she leaned back against the wall. She didn’t want to lie. But she didn’t want to tell her the truth, either.

My friends deserted me the moment my family lost prominence
, Sara thought bitterly,
Every last one of them at the fighters’ school wouldn’t give me a nod or speak to me anymore.

Sara knew that wasn’t entirely fair. After all, it was she that avoided the gladiatorial halls after her father’s execution, but neither had they made an attempt to see her outside of the school walls. She hadn’t seen hide nor hair of any of her former friends in months. It stung.

Her mother nodded, then moved over to sit on the bench. She patted the space beside her for Sara to seat herself and they ate a dinner of peas and fresh-caught fish in silence.

As she finished her meal, Sara asked politely, “The bread is for the morning sales?”

Her mother nodded. “The baker was kind enough to let me fill some orders for him on the wharf in the morning. It should be a good day. I can get five to ten shillings for that. If I give him two shillings for acquiring the permit, we can keep the rest.”

Sara didn’t say anything to that. Five or ten shillings would make a difference in whether or not they kept a roof over their head. But it would only stretch so far.

Sara nodded. “May I be excused?”

“Yes,” said her mother, “but one moment, Sara.”

Sara looked at her mother patiently.

“I don’t want you out on the streets. Getting into fights. It’s not good for you.”

“I wasn’t in a fight.”

“Don’t you lie to me, Sara Fairchild,” her mother said. “Your father tried the same thing. I could see through him just as I can see through you now.”

“Well, Father lied about a lot of things,” Sara snapped as she stood up abruptly and rushed away.

Only the quiet gasp of her mother behind her halted her retreat. The greatest fighter in Sandrin was barely able to control the emotions that rushed through her. Only her family could get her this worked up with just a conversation.
 

Sara laughed bitterly.
Only my mother could ever make me retreat in a battle
.

Slowly she exhaled and unclenched her fists.

Turning, Sara said, “That was wrong of me, Mother. I’m sorry.”

Her mother shook her head. “I just want you to be
safe,
Sara.”

“I
am
safe. I’m the best fighter in this city. I tested out of all the grade levels at the fighter’s academy and I’ve never been bested in a duel.”

Her mother bit her lip as she looked at Sara wistfully. “Your father said the very same thing to me when we started courting.”

Sara stared back at her. “What did you say to him then?”

Her mother whispered the words to her: “That I’d never forgive myself if he died before I did.”

Sara felt a tumult of emotions rise up in her chest.

Her mother shook her head sadly. “He made me a promise then and there to end the fights. He knew how much our life together meant to me. That’s why he became a commander in the empress’s army. He was supposed to be
safe
. With hundreds of soldiers between him and his fiercest opponent. Instead, he became his own worst enemy.”

There was nothing Sara could say to that. It was true.

But she knew what her mother wanted to hear.

“I’ll be careful. I’ll be safe. No more fights,” she whispered to her mother.

Her mother nodded her head in thanks.

Sara cleared her throat and said a sentence it pained her to say. “Tomorrow I’m going to the fisherman’s district. To see if I can find a job as a fishwife.”

Hope and sorrow warred in her mother’s eyes. Sara was the best fighter in the city. She could best anyone she came up against. Just like her father. But because of her father she was barred from entering purse-winning tournaments or even fighting in the gladiatorial games. For too long she had tried to scrounge at the card tables for easy pickings. Now, they had no choice. She might have won forty shillings from Simon Codfield tonight, but he’d barely had ten in his pocket. The rest he’d promised on ‘credit.’ She learned to never trust credit; it was bloody hard to collect, and besides, dead men paid no fines.

Now she and her mother were close to starving and every bit of money she was able to get was going to rent. Sara had no choice. She wouldn’t take to stealing coins. She wouldn’t. Weapons from a duel was fair play. But taking another man’s purse was not. So she needed to do something to keep them fed. If that meant a Fairchild working in the fishing docks, so be it. They looked at each other—in accordance for once.
 

“Goodnight, Mother,” Sara said quietly.

“Goodnight, dear,” her mother replied.

Sara went to the door and collected her weapons and the bucket of water from outside. She need to clean and polish all of them before she went to bed tonight. After trudging up the rickety ladder to her room in the loft, she sat down on her small bed and tugged off her boots one by one. Then she carefully took each weapon and cleaned it of blood, polished it and sheathed it for the night. Only after the weapons were clean did Sara tend to herself. As she climbed back down the ladder, she had an easy view of what passed as a kitchen nook for them. It was really all one room with a small recess for a cooking pot and then her mother’s ‘room’ cordoned off with a string and cord. But it was home, and Sara smiled to see a steaming kettle in the hot coals. On the bench, next to the kettle of steaming water was some lavender soap.