23. Lily
The three days that follow are a blur of bruises, of sweat and a singular, searing focus. From dawn to dusk, Grok and I sequester ourselves in the training yard, putting me through the most punishing training of my life.
He is a exacting taskmaster, pushing me to the very limits of my endurance and ability. We spar for hours, clashing and defending, him calling out instructions and observations even as he presses his ruthless advance.
”Keep your guard up,” he barks, his practice blade whipping towards my head in a whistling arc. ”And watch your footing, always. Krag will try to use his size against you, to overbalance you. You must be quick and clever. Fast and light as a dragonfly on a pond.”
I arch a brow even as I dance away from his strike, bringing my own weapon up in a ringing parry. ”I thought I was meant to be a lily,” I quip breathlessly, darting inside his reach to land a scoring tap on his side. ”Make up your mind, my love.”
He growls playfully, amber eyes glinting with proud approval even as he redoubles his attacks. ”You are a menace,” he informs me, punctuating each word with the thud and clatter of wood on wood. ”A vexing menace who will be the death of me.”
I grin fiercely as I spin away, dropping low to sweep his legs and send him stumbling. ”Only a little death, I hope,” I tease, pressing my advantage with a flurry of blows. ”I still have uses for you, beyond the battlefield.”
His answering laugh is a low, wicked thing, even as he regains his balance and begins to stalk me around the ring, a predator toying with his prey. ”Is that so?” he purrs, his voice a silken rumble I can feel to the depths of my belly. ”Perhaps you should show me these...uses, when we are through here. So I might better serve my queen”s pleasure.”
Heat floods me. With an effort, I wrench my focus back to the fight, to the dance of death that decides our fate. But a part of me remains attuned to him, vibrating with the promise, the potential, that pulses between us.
The promise of forever, hard-won and precious. Of a love forged in strife, in the midst of combat and the warmth of our hearts.
The love I will fight for, die for, with every fiber of my being. Every breath in my body.
Until the very last.
The dayof the duel dawns bright and baleful, the sky a harsh blue above the castle walls. I rise from a restless slumber, my muscles singing with anticipation, my mind blessedly blank and calm.
Today is the day. The moment of truth. The gauntlet thrown before the feet of fate, daring it to dash our hopes...or deliver us to triumph.
Grok is already awake and armored beside me, a bulk of barely-leashed tension and tightly-reined terror. He helps me dress in grim, weighted silence, his hands straying as if to memorize me.
As I settle my helmet over my braided hair, he catches my chin in gentle, callused fingers. Tips my face up to his, his eyes loving and anguished all at once.
”Lily,” he rasps, and the ragged emotion in that single word undoes me. I surge up on my toes, claiming his mouth in a fierce kiss. A silent vow, a voiceless promise.
I will win this. I will come back to you.
Now and always, beyond breath or bone...I am yours.
He crushes me to him, just for a moment. Just for a single, shattered heartbeat. Then, with a shuddering exhale...he sets me back. Firms his jaw and squares his shoulders, stepping back into the skin of the warlord. The leader, stoic and stalwart.
”Come,” he says quietly. ”It”s time.”
Hand in hand, we descend to the great hall, to the churning sea of faces—human and ogre, hopeful and hostile. They part before us like water, a rippling wave of whispers and speculation.
In the center of the hall, a ring has been laid out in colored sand, a circle of crimson and ochre. At its edge, the Master of Arms awaits with a stern expression on his face, prepared to step in should it come to that.
Krag is already waiting, a towering mass of bulging muscle and belligerent menace. He bares his teeth at me in a feral grin, flexing his fingers around the haft of his huge war-hammer.
”Ready to die, human?” he taunts, loud enough for all to hear. ”Ready to choke on your own arrogance, your own lies?”
I don”t deign to respond, stepping calmly to the edge of the ring. I feel Grok”s gaze on me, heavy and hot, wretched and reverent all at once. But I don”t look at him. I can”t. If I do, I”ll fly apart, shatter into a thousand sorrowing shards.
Instead, I fix my eyes on my opponent. On my target, my trial.
My destiny, writ large in grim, towering hatred.
”Seal the circle,” the Master intones, and the gathered crowd joins him, human and ogre voices blending in uncanny unison. ”Bind the blood, and the blades that spill it. From this ring, only one may rise...and in their rising, raise all.”
The ancient words wash over me, through me. I feel them settle into my skin, suffusing me with a sudden, diamond clarity.
I was made for this, I realize with a distant, dizzying wonder. Made for this moment, this mission.
To be the blade in the dark, the light in the shadow. The hammer...that shatters the old order, the old enmities.
And forges something new, something miraculous...from the ruins and the rubble.
With that thought held tight to my heart, a talisman against my fear...I step into the ring. Into my fate, my future.
Into the fight of my life...for the love that has remade me. Redefined me.
For Grok. For us, and the world we would build.
I raise my sword, slipping into a guard stance as Krag bellows and charges, all brute force and bloodlust. Our blades meet with a shriek and clang of steel on steel, the impact juddering up my arms, rattling my teeth. Krag is a juggernaut, a mountain of muscle and murderous intent. He beats at my guard like a battering ram, trying to overpower me, to crush me beneath his superior size and strength.
But I am a reed, not an oak. I bend and sway, deflecting rather than blocking, conserving my energy as I dance and dart around him. Employing all the speed and subtlety Grok drilled into me, I weave a net of flashing silver around the ogre, striking and slipping away before he can bring his hammer to bear.
Slash and slice, feint and fade. The world narrows to the ring, to the deadly dance of blade and body, breath and blood. Sweat stings my eyes, trickles down my spine beneath my armor. My muscles burn, my lungs heave.
But still I press on, giving ground strategically. Letting Krag expend his fury, his force, in wild swings and bellowed taunts.
”Stand and fight, little girl!” he rages, spittle flying from his tusked mouth. ”Or do you mean to prance about forever, relying on your little human tricks?”
I don”t answer, saving my breath, my focus. Around and around we go, the crimson sand churned to a bloody mire beneath our boots. The crowd roars and hisses, a distant din to my ears.
I am in the void, in the hush within. The place of pure concentration, where thought falls away and there is only action. Only instinct, honed to a killing edge.
I see my opening, my chance. Krag overextends, his hammer smashing into the ground where I stood a split second before. Reversing my grip on my sword, I lunge forward, sliding between his tree-trunk legs like an otter through water.
A twist and I”m behind him, kicking out viciously at the backs of his knees, where ogre anatomy mirrors human. He staggers, off-balance, and I leap onto his back, wrapping my free arm around his neck in a chokehold as I press my blade to his jugular.
”Yield!” I rasp in his ear, my heart hammering against his spine. ”Yield, Krag, and I will spare your life!”
But he only roars, reaching back to seize me by the scruff and hurl me bodily across the ring. I hit the ground hard, rolling with the impact, fighting to suck air back into my stunned lungs.
And suddenly Krag is on me, knocking my blade aside with a contemptuous swat of his hammer. His hand locks around my throat, clawed fingers digging into my flesh as he pins me to the churned earth.
”Weak,” he sneers down at me, his weight crushing, compressing. Black spots bloom in my vision, the world going grey and gauzy at the edges. ”Weak and worthless, just like that lovestruck fool who thought to make you his queen.”
Through the encroaching dark, through the thickening fog...I see Grok. See his face, etched in lines of anguish and impotent fury. See the tears that slip down his ashen cheeks, the way his lips form my name. A invocation, a lamentation.
No. No, I will not let it end like this. I will not let our dream die here, in the dust.
I will not fail him. I will not fail us.
With a burst of desperate strength, I bring my knee up into Krag”s groin, the only vulnerable spot I can reach. He grunts, his grip loosening reflexively, and I wrench free, scrabbling for my fallen sword.
My fingers close around the grip just as Krag lunges for me, his hammer hissing down in a killing arc. I roll aside, feeling the kiss of displaced air, the spray of sand. And before he can recover, I”m surging to my feet, driving my blade up and in, aiming for the unprotected juncture of neck and shoulder.
But Krag is quick, quicker than I gave him credit for. He twists at the last second, taking the thrust high in the meat of his chest. A glancing blow, painful but not mortal.
We reel apart, both bleeding, both panting raggedly. I can feel my strength flagging, my body battered and muscles burning, pushed to the limit of endurance.
But I can see it in Krag”s eyes, in the set of his shoulders and the tremor in his sword arm. He”s weakening too, the toll of our duel, our dance, catching up to him.
It”s now or never. Strike now, Lily...or forever surrender the field, and with it the future.
Sucking in a harsh breath, I charge, a war cry tearing from my throat. Krag braces to receive me, hammer cocked back, lips peeled from his bloodied teeth.
At the last instant, I drop and skid, the churned sand slick beneath my feet. I slide between his braced legs like a bolt from a bow, twisting lithely to hamstring him as I pass.
Krag howls, his knee buckling, sending him crashing to the ground. In a flash I”m on him, my blade kissing his throat as my knee digs into his spine, right at the juncture of neck and shoulder. The kill spot, the quick stop.
”Yield,” I pant, leaning in close, so only he can hear. ”Yield, Krag...and I will not shame you further. I will give you the dignity, the mercy, of a clean death, here in the ring of equals.”
A taut, terrible pause. I feel his body bunch and quiver beneath me, feel the rage and humiliation, the thwarted bloodlust, pouring off him in waves.
But in the end, even Krag the Cruel, Krag the Crazed...is not immune to reason. Of salvaging what little pride remains to him, in the face of inexorable defeat.
”I yield,” he grates out, the words sounding as if they”re being dragged from him on fishhooks, on shards of glass. ”I yield...to Lily Thornwood, the Red Blade. The ogre-wife, the queen of peace.”
A beat. A breath. And then...the crowd erupts. Cheers and chants, howls of disbelief and begrudging respect. Ogre voices lifted in grudging salute to my strength, my mettle...and human cries of joy, of validation, for their champion.
I barely hear them. My world, my attention, has narrowed to the male who shoves his way into the ring, who falls to his knees at my side and hauls me into his arms, crushing me to the hard heat of him.
”Lily,” Grok rasps, his voice shattered, shaking. ”Gods, Lily. My heart, my own...you were magnificent. You were...”
But I stop his words with my mouth, surging up to claim his lips in a fierce, fervent kiss. A kiss of triumph, of jubilation.
Of promise, unbreakable and unending.
Around us, the celebration swells and builds, humans and ogres mingling in tentative camaraderie, in the first fragile tendrils of fellowship. Of a future snatched from the jaws of hate and history, forged in the fires of single combat and a commitment beyond compare.
But Grok and I remain locked in our own small world, our perfect, private bubble of relief and ravishment. Touching, tasting, reaffirming with hands and lips and the hot press of heartbeats that we are here, we are whole.
We have weathered the storm, and emerged victorious. Together, as we were always meant to be.
As we will always be, from this day to the last day, and every breath between.
”My love,” I whisper against his mouth, my fingers twining in his wild mane, anchoring him to me. ”My lord, my liege...take me from here. Take me home, to our chambers...and let me show you, with all that I am, how I adore you. How I need you, now and always...”