Chapter 24 Guillaume
Guillaume
Ihad not expected Milord to follow through with the commitment to train. But he woke me the next morning, shaking me from where I had curled in on myself in the straw, as far away from the others as I could get.
The rays of the sun cresting over the forest—the very same forest that had showed us horrors that unsettled even me—flickered against the faerie enchantment on Milord.
Wisps of her pale golden hair caught the sunlight, even as my blades flashed silver as I drew them to show her the very best techniques to disable or kill a man.
Her hunting skills did translate some to human anatomy, I had to grant.
And by the time we had been training for nearly an hour, she was dewy with sweat.
I could see each droplet coalescing on her fair skin, as though taunting me with watery spheres I would never get to sip and use to relieve my thirst.
But I was a weapon. And she was the noble hand who would wield me, with or without my consent.
And I refused to be used and discarded again.
Nearing the end of the hour, she practiced the non-lethal strikes on me, and I demonstrated the ways she might be disarmed.
My goal was to stay physically disengaged, both out of a desire not to hurt her—she was my sworn liege, after all—and out of having the common sense to not get any closer to her than necessary.
I would not join the ranks of Benoit and Lucas, sappily devoted lackeys that they had become.
I could not deny the appeal of her physical appearance, and I saw it more often than the rest of them, but the aristocratic air she effortlessly exuded always dragged my mind back to that first goal: to not become hers in any more sense than necessary to complete this quest and attain my revenge on Matapa.
At this point, even with only one faerie-enhanced sense, I could smell her perspiration, and hear her heavy breathing.
My own breathing was quiet, as usual, for how else was I to be the perfect assassin?
As for my scent, I had not worked up much of a sweat yet, though I suspected I carried the leathery smell of my many sheaths that rarely left my person.
Bad enough that I would see her sparkling visage all day; I did not need her scent teasing my nose, and with it, my determination.
“Enough,” I growled, having cast my gaze into the darkness of the stable, and thus having seen that all the rest were roused and preparing for the day, cementing my resolve to end this session and be on the road soon.
In answer, she launched herself at me again, and while her advantage of surprise was brief enough to not unbalance me more than momentarily, a knife came to my hand so automatically that I knew I had to make an effort not to instinctively use it, and so I let her topple me to the ground.
Her own blade, still sheathed for the practice, had found my lower ribs. It could have been a killing blow, though under normal circumstances, I would have killed her first.
But I had hesitated.
It went against everything in my training, my nature, the twisted gift the faerie had given me before crushing my hopes and destroying my soul.
Even if her successful strike and my hesitation were not galling enough, I gritted my jaw at this newest indignity: with her body atop mine, my body could not help but respond.
The faerie enchantment was clever. It even accounted for weight, such that it felt that a man almost my own size was atop me.
And normally I would not glance at a man in anything more carnal than admiration, but the solid, warm weight that I knew belonged to an infuriatingly noble and beautiful woman…
my mind begrudgingly logged the contrast, and it stirred my cock.
I stayed very, very still. Which I was good at, for all the cruelest reasons.
“Guillaume?” her voice was muffled from whence it emerged, somewhere between my chest and armpit.
This was because she had taken one of the offensive moves I had shown her and turned it into a dangerously self-sacrificing move, lowering her head at the last minute as though to head-butt me, and getting the blade to my ribs under that cover.
I shoved her off me, hoping to hear a satisfying grunt of pain or surprise, but she made no sound. In a moment, I was on my feet, extending a hand to help her up.
“That was foolish,” I said, not caring if disdain colored my voice.
“It was how I wrestled with my sisters growing up. It seemed a grown man might not have expected it.”
I stared at the blade in my hand, scowling at it for how well it had almost done its job.
“We’re done for today,” I growled, stalking off to alert the others.
Being on the move once more did not improve my mood.
I encouraged Lucas to scout ahead and report back to me, so that I might keep my partial blindfold on and not have to look anyone in the eye.
I expected nothing of interest that would require me to look ahead, but after only a few hours, Lucas raced back, confusion tugging at his normally mild expression.
“I crossed a stream while running ahead…but when I returned that way, the river was gone! Guillaume, will you look?”
By now, Aubert had overheard the conversation, and his turning towards us had alerted the rest, so I sighed and lifted my blindfold so that I might use the fullest extent of my faerie sight to peer along the path ahead.
What Lucas claimed was true: though we were at least twenty minutes’ walk away, there was a stream ahead…
…or what had been a stream.
I could see the silt glistening, still wet. Tiny minnows flopped on the moist dirt, drowning in reverse. The shape demarcation between the dry and wet dirt revealed that it had been a small stream, doubtless one Lucas had crossed in an easy leap. But it was, as he had said, no more.
A trickle of water irrigated the mud further, coming from upstream. As I watched for another moment, the tiniest of streams began to form again, the natural forces directing water from the stream’s source renewing it.
Suddenly, a force from downstream sucked away all the water.
“I think we found our man,” I said grimly.
The company Milord had assembled was thus far tolerable, and some of us might even prove useful.
But every step we took brought us closer to the political intrigues of the capital, to the web of lies and violence Matapa was no doubt weaving in the backdrop as part of his attempt to conquer all.
I knew this because I had once served him.
And would die before doing so again.