This excerpt is a work in progress; it has yet to go through professional editing and proofreading. It does not represent the quality of the final manuscript.
An Immortal King’s Blade
— Lucius —
Lucius was bored.
He had been hit by the malaise that grips warriors once fame and fortune earn them a fief and a title. His trip to the elven kingdom of Quel’Nimara was the first time since leaving the temple where he grew as a youth that he had not come to hunt something or fight someone.
He did not know what to do with himself.
Memphala had been accepted with little reluctance—in truth, no reluctance at all—by the elven mages. Quite the opposite: they welcomed her into the Arkanun, intrigued by the blood-magic she studied.
Sandelar had gone further and taken up temporary residence at the Arkanun. There had been little to do in terms of advancing their quest, so the elf had focused on sharpening his mind and learning what he could from the Water Tribe’s sages. Of Gelbin… Lucius had no idea what the elven ranger was up to. He seemed to have disappeared into the city after their first day.
Silas, of course, was the one on whom everything in their quest balanced; it was up to the scholar to secure Princess Nerathiel’s cooperation.
That left Lucius with little to do, and he ended up lounging the days away in the company of Ambassador Silverin, taking long strolls through the city and sitting for even longer stretches at the tables of many a seaside eating-and-drinking house.
Perhaps being bored is something I could get used to, Lucius thought, fishing a mollusk’s soft flesh from within the opened shell with his fingers and shoving it into his mouth.
It was delicious—just the right amount of salt, with a squeeze of lime. He had tasted delicacies from all over the northern lands, the Holy Kingdom, and even a bit in the Girmun territories. Thus far, the Republic of Garm had produced his favorite foods, but the elves might yet catch up.
Silverin, too, was good company and a generous host. He insisted on paying for everything, which was just as well because Lucius had no currency but golden and silver Emperors, which he suspected were of little value among the elves.
More than that, the elven ambassador had a gift for speaking the right amount. He told good tales, expounded upon their civilization, but also knew when to let silence take hold and allow them to bask in the seaside vistas.
I suppose I’m making too much of it, Lucius thought. I should be thankful for good, peaceful times.
But as he soaked one more piece of bread in the gravy of the bowl full of mollusks and chased it down with a glass of fine elven wine—sweet and delicate, much sweeter than wine from an isle this far up north had any right to be—he began to feel bloated. He patted his belly, and the physical heaviness gave way to the mental sting of guilt. Was that to be his fate now, that he had settled down? To grow old as a fat Lohanian lord?
It struck him then that back in his youth, before his travels forced fitness and strength upon his body, he had been drilled and disciplined by the senior monks in the Temple of the Pines. They were enamored with heavy food and heavier drink, but made up for it with a serious training regimen. Perhaps now it was time for him to drive that discipline into himself again.
“My friend Silverin,” Lucius began.
Silverin, who was sipping his wine from a beautiful copper cup engraved with fine patterns of seaweed and mollusk, his eyes chasing the horizon just above the glittering blue seas, turned his head and smiled a slow smile at Lucius. So friendly and joyful was the elf that not even the pointy teeth characteristic of his race managed to give an edge to his countenance.
“What, my dearest guest? What can I do for you? Would you like more to eat? Would you like me to send for more refined wine? It will be—”
“No, no, not at all. The wine is fantastic. Thank you, Silverin,” Lucius said. “I was wondering if there is any place where I can spar. It’s been a while, and I fear my blade grows dull.”
“Of course,” the ambassador said, his almost scaly face taking on a faint purple hue. Was he flushing? “I can’t believe I hadn’t thought of that. Of course, someone like you requires more entertainment than sightseeing, eating, and drinking. Forgive me. I am not as good a host as I thought.”
“That’s enough, Silverin—and please,” Lucius cut in, “I already asked you not to stand on such formality with me. Can we find such a place?”
“Naturally,” the elf nodded. “Closer to your quarters than you might think. The Sapphire King is an expert swordsman, and he has plenty of sparring partners on hand at all times. He has told me to extend every hospitality at the Sapphire’s court to you, and that would be no different. Come,” he said, rising from the marble table. “I’ll settle our account here, and we’ll walk back to the palace.”
Lucius smiled and nodded. “Thank you.”
As the elf went inside the building to pay for their meal and drink, Lucius let his gaze rest again on the rolling waves, the sun shining upon them, giving the sea the look of liquid aquamarine.
It would do him good to swing a sword again.
Silverin led Lucius through a pair of lesser doors, and the sparring hall opened like a cavern hidden in the midst of the palace: a high ceiling, walls of polished sea-glass that drank the light of the blue fire burning in the surrounding braziers and returned it tamer; wide slabs of pearlstone marked into rectangles where water ran in shallow grooves and vanished into the floor. A row of columns cut the space into bays.
Several elves trained there. Bare-chested, their torsos gleamed with the sheen of sea-slick skin. They moved with the same serpentine motion Lucius had seen during the war. Spears jabbed in tight arcs, sabers sang and whispered through the air. Their blades looked as if hewn from the ribs of leviathans: pale, striated whalebone bound in silver wire. They were beautiful things, and they looked ungodly sharp.
The weapons looked deadly, too.
“Here,” Silverin said. He gestured, and the nearest training pair broke apart with courtesy. “We keep a few spare blades for guests. Master Lucius, if you please.”
Lucius bowed and took the offered saber. It fitted his hand with balance close to his bastard sword, though lighter, the curve of the grip guiding both two-handed leverage and easy one-handed work.
“I meant to spar, not kill, Silverin,” Lucius said.
Silverin laughed. “Allow me to demonstrate.”
Lucius gasped. With no warning, the ambassador gripped the blade with his bare hand, then drove his palm up and down the edge with more force than his slim frame belied. Not a drop of blood came forth.
“A clever illusion,” Silverin explained. “These are shaped of hardened sea-sponge around a thin metal core for weight, then a glamour is cast upon them to make them look deadly. You’d sooner harm yourself or others with a soup spoon.”
Lucius chuckled, testing the edge himself. Indeed, it felt blunter than a wooden sword.
Then Silverin called, “Varinel!”
One of the young elves who had stopped for them came forward. In human terms, he looked perhaps a decade past manhood, which likely put him at some two thousand years over Lucius. His shoulders were broad, his frame with the lean of someone schooled in long hours beneath a master’s eye. A long pale scar curled across his ribs. He moved barefoot, toes splayed to feel the pearlstone, eyes quick and assessing.
Silverin presented him as though discussing a fine vintage. “Varinel, Master Lucius. Lord of Mistvale.”
Varinel inclined his head once, without flourish. “Master Lucius,” he said. His voice had an edge that had not been blunted by magic. He stepped into the marked square and set his blade. “I will take the light.” He tapped his practice saber twice against his palm, the sound mild. “If you prefer two-handed, I will close range. If you take one-handed, I will press from the flank.”
Lucius laughed. “You sound like a merchant with clever wares. I prefer both.”
They circled one another. Water hissed somewhere close; the hall’s light bent over them. Lucius opened with his sword gripped in both hands, feet wide, forward motion. He drew the lunging step he’d practiced since Garm, a move meant to start and end fights at once. Varinel met it with a half-turn that made the whalebone saber skim Lucius’s blade, sending a sting up the shaft. Not only did the sponge-blades look like the real deal, but they also sounded like it, too.
Varinel’s footwork was short and snapping. He closed and opened with the tide’s rhythm—push, retreat, circle—his saber tracing small, vicious lines. Lucius shifted to a one-handed grip and found the balance familiar; he flicked the sword in a loose cut, punched with his off-hand toward Varinel’s shoulder to unsettle his guard, then followed with a low kick aimed at the elf’s knee.
Varinel’s response was immediate: a slide back, a parry that glanced Lucius’s blade aside, and a counter that clipped the air where Lucius’s ribs had been—close enough that he felt the draft along his skin.
They matched each other: Lucius with the blunt style he had picked up between his northern homeland and his Girmun companions, weight moved in arcs and lunges, the occasional low kick that set a rhythm and opened a chest. Varinel replied with the lithe cruelty of a blade designed to sting and withdraw, stepping inside reach when the bastard sword’s arc left him open, pressing with a point and then sliding away.
“You move well,” Varinel said between exchanges, voice even. “Not clumsy with the two-handed. Dangerous when you commit.”
“And you hold your line,” Lucius returned, sweat slick at the small of his back. “You flank clean.”
A short distance away, other elven swordsmen watched with the discreet interest of those who had seen many pairings. Apart from their fight, the hall had fallen into silence.
That silence broke as the great doors at the far end of the hall opened. Light from inner waters threw indigo bands across the floor. The Sapphire King walked in with a casual stride, as one arrives at the kitchen ready to break his fast. Tall, his silver-melted hair fell over his back like a cloak, and he wore a light-blue vest that was simple in design but as magically regal as he in effect, for the light gleamed off it pale as wave-foam. He crossed the hall without haste, and every head bowed before him.
He came alone. Lucius had never seen a monarch arrive anywhere alone. Even Emperor Calcas was usually shadowed by Paladin Herodus, master of the Imperial guard.
Thalendir stopped a few paces away and watched. He said nothing, but merely observed with those sapphire eyes that seemed to bore into men’s souls. Lucius slowed for a breath, yet his limbs felt fuller under the glare.
Then Thalendir’s glance moved to Varinel. “How fares our guest?” the king asked, voice softer than Lucius expected. “Sport? Threat?”
Varinel answered without breaking rhythm, blade tucked, eyes never leaving Lucius’s feet and sword-hand. “Neither threatening nor easy. Unique and interesting. The human fights with his entire body, using his feet to strike as well as balance.” The words came clipped, then a twist of a half-smile at the end.
Thalendir’s look sharpened as if tasting the phrase. He raised one hand. “Stop.”
Varinel’s blade stilled, the motion frozen mid-arc. It wasn’t a show of obedience but the quick, absolute precision of iron-bound fealty and perfect discipline. Lucius, who had been committed into a wide step and moving for leverage, barely managed to kill his swing. His sword passed within an inch of Varinel’s cheek. The elf didn’t flinch.
Thalendir moved closer, watching Lucius with an odd, unreadable expression.
Then he unbuttoned the front of his ethereal vest and shrugged it off onto the floor. There were a couple of gasps. The Sapphire King stood before Lucius, towering a full head over him, with a powerful, scaled pale-blue torso crisscrossed with scars more befitting a gladiator than a king.
“Would you do me the honor of a spar, Lord Lucius of Mistvale?”
A normal man would have been floored by the sheer, noble presence of the great elf. But Lucius carried within him the disregard for authority of a northerner, and the serenity of one who had spent most of his life buffeted by the winds of fate and had accepted it. Where others would be paralyzed by such an offering, he saw the same opportunity for a rich experience as he had when Silverin introduced him to the fine dining of the sea elves.
“The honor is mine, Your Royal Highness.”
Lucius and Varinel traded a last glance. The younger elf stepped back, handing his blade to the king. Silverin said nothing. The hall’s blue fire dimmed as if the braziers listened.
Thalendir tested the blade’s weight in his palm, then rolled his wrist once. The glamour-bitten sponge hissed like a true edge. He took three steps back.
“We fight to three strikes. Ambassador Silverin, will you referee for us?”
“As you desire, my king.”
“We await your word,” Thalendir said.
Silverin looked at Lucius. Lucius nodded. The ambassador spoke.
“His Royal Majesty Thalendir the Sapphire King, Lord of Quel’Nimara, Protector of the Ancients, Ruler of Tides, and First Son of the Water Tribe shall now cross blades with Master Lucius Langeshen, Lord of Mistvale. Three strikes, three counts. One. Two. Three.”
Lucius moved.
He came in on the heel of his lunge, the old Garm step set to split space and thought alike. The king drifted aside as if the wind had nudged him. No wasted motion. No flourish. The saber turned, kissed Lucius’s blade near the forte, and took the strength out of it. His arc sagged. He recovered, flipped the blade to one hand, then punched for the king’s collarbone, cut for the ribs.
Thalendir’s answer was the smallest thing: a tilt of his head, a slide of his front foot, a soft tap that set Lucius’s cut off its track. His palm opened, closed around Lucius’s off-wrist, then released it before skin met skin.
It was a statement: I could. I choose not to. Lucius tried to read him and found nothing there but a bright, steady cold.
A first touch landed. He felt it at the center of his chest. Not pain. A push, nothing more. He gave ground, boots skidding along pearlstone. Water hissed in its grooves like a quiet crowd.
Silverin shouted. “Thalendir, one!”
Lucius laughed, breath thin. “Again.”
They tied. Lucius changed height, went low, brought the bastard strokes that had split shields and snapped bones, drove his shoulder through as the girmun captain Ulla Oedinger had taught him, kicked at the king’s knee when the line opened.
Thalendir was not there. He caught the kick on the hard shelf of his shin, slid inside the arc, let Lucius’s blade pass the space his throat had just owned, then set his saber along Lucius’s forearm with a clean slide that ended at the elbow’s hinge.
“Strength prodigious,” Thalendir said as their guards ground together. His voice did not rise. “A smith hammered it into you. You carry it like a standard. Good.”
The king pushed.
Lucius drove every tendon into the bind. His back shuddered. The pressure that came down felt like a cliff deciding to move. Not cruel. Inevitable. He gave another two steps before he threw himself to the side with a turn that should have bought him space.
No such space came. The second touch—light, a tap at the hip—broke his stance. He caught himself on the edge of the marked square, toes biting pearlstone.
“Thalendir, two!”
Lucius tried speed. He tried stillness. He tried the ugly tricks of the north, a swing that begged to be punished and demanded greed. The king declined greed as a monk declines wine. He moved with the economy of a sculptor who had spent a century cutting away everything that did not matter. Lucius learned entire lessons in the thin inches between their blades and still could not live long enough inside those inches to use them.
The third blow arrived. Thalendir drew his saber back no more than a finger’s width, then placed the flat across Lucius’s throat.
Silence hung in the hall.
“Thalendir, three!”
Lucius bowed. Sweat dripped from his jaw to the pearlstone where it vanished into neat channels.
He did not feel diminished. He felt like a man who had pushed at the door of a temple and found it heavy because gods had leaned against it from within.
Thalendir lowered his blade. He did not straighten at once. He looked at Lucius like a tailor getting ready for a fit.
“You have the makings of a legend,” the king said. “But you think. In the cut, you must stop thinking. Let your body lead.”
Lucius blinked. He could not stop the crooked grin that came. “Forgive me, Your Majesty. That is strange counsel to a soldier. Do you read my mind?”
Thalendir shook his head, a slight motion, the silver of his hair whispering along his back. “I do not. I need not. Your eyes speak when you choose a line. Your face arranges itself when you lie to your feet about where they will go. Your muscles say what your wrists plan. A book written in skin and meat.” He paused, and some shard of old iron cut through his tone. “And I have fought those who truly read minds.”
Curiosity won. Lucius set the practice blade’s tip on the floor and leaned, for it was all he could do to remain upright.
“Who?”
The king’s gaze shifted to the far doors, to the indigo bands they cast. “Do you humans know of the Fall of Dragons? The end of the previous age?”
“The Night Dragon?” Lucius asked. “We know how the three human gods-to-be banished it…”
Thalendir’s mouth thinned, and the braziers guttered as if a great thing had passed by and turned its head.
“Truly? I seem to remember four fledgling human gods… of course, I was just a young boy at the time, barely a decade a swordsmaster. I fought in that war, my dear guest, that war that ended millennia before any in this room were born. The Night Dragon had allies among his kind… Dragons were our original gods, and do not doubt that they could read your mind. In fact, they could pre-empt your thought, for they were as much a part of the world as the air you breathe and the light cast by the sun, and so the only way to match them is to either mask your thoughts under thirteen layers of subterfuge, or to not have them at all.”
The elven king smiled. “But we are unlikely to fight such beings again in our lifetimes, and for that we should be glad.”
Finally, Thalendir tipped his head a fraction, an act that even one as unfamiliar with nobility as Lucius understood was a show of infinite generosity. “Nonetheless, I hope you will meditate upon my counsel. I would relish seeing what you could achieve in time.”
Lucius bowed low.
“I am a warrior, Your Highness. To ignore your counsel would be as counter to my nature as it would be to simply cease breathing. I am honored, and I am eternally grateful.”
Thalendir’s next words came low, murmured. “Oh, what an air of serious dullness I let my sparring room fall into.” He clapped and raised his voice. “To the eating hall, my swordsmen, my ambassador, my guest. Let us drink some mead—to you, my dear guest, Master Lucius!”
The elves, normally stoic and composed, erupted in cheer.
The Lost Elven Realms series is avaliable to buy now on Amazon. Book 4 arrives this fall.
