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1481 D.R.
The high-walled ragstone townhouse in which Ulder Ravengard so seldom spends his time sits in an almost respectable quarter of Heapside: gray with grimy snow, cheerless in the chary light of the wick-and-oil lamps, but peaceable. Sometimes.
“Should I raise the hue and cry?” asks Florrick’s driver, dubious, over the din of blades clashing in the yard.
“If Blaze Ravengard is in a swordfight,” says Florrick with crisp amusement, stepping down from the carriage without his arm, “let us assume that he is winning.”
It’s been some time since she called on Ravengard at home, but there are matters she’d like to discuss with Ulder—and only Ulder—before the midwinter council of the Peers. They’ve taken notice of him, of late: compliments that he frowns at, bribes that he returns, invitations to ridottos at which he stands like a dashing wooden beam. Florrick will be surprised, if pleased, if she’s arrived before any other demands on his time have rolled out of bed.
She raps the gate with her staff, then lets herself in. Blaze Ravengard is not in the swordfight. In his modest forecourt a woollen-wrapped young Wyll and some wicked old personage from Parliament—jeweled at hands and throat and baldric, muddy at the riding-boots, barking wolfish laughs from the cowl of a shearling cloak—are crossing foils. The blades slice like blunted lightning through the quick clouds of their breath.
Flashing one’s moonstone cufflinks in Heapside is—confident. Florrick squints through the snowglint at the boy’s assailant, then checks. “Milord Duke!”
All that broidered shearling—fanciful stuff, birds and beasts of the hunt picked out in shining thread—billows as the fencer whirls. A flurry blows back the cowl. Silvering hair and snowflakes whip round the Ward of Gorion’s monstrous muzzle of a face: ruddy with cold, creased with vicious lines, smiling at her with beleaguered delight. “Why, Councillor—”
Wyll’s foil bends against his foe’s forearm. His eyes flash with something of his father’s triumphant spark: Ulder Ravengard writ small, though the boy’s sprung up half a hand since Florrick saw him last. She almost smiles. His shoulders must exasperate his tailor. “Touché, your Grace!”
“Maimed, am I?” The old creature ducks out of reach with unnatural ease, nimble as the boy, and obligingly tucks the arm behind their back. Their foil flicks up and down like a music-master’s wand, turning Wyll’s aside. “Fortissimo, bravissimo—my goodness, young Ravengard, what do you call that one?”
Wyll, skidding with a shout of laughter in some slush, turns the mishap into a thrust. “The Legend’s Strike—”
The Duke catches him by the scruff before he falls. Florrick, with dignity, snorts and sidesteps them. All play, no work. “Puppies, the pair of you.”
The breathless grins they exchange tell her all. When the Duke slings Wyll at her, she raises her eyebrows and trips the boy into a snowbank. Her staff knocks aside a lunge of the Duke’s that shudders from the magewood to her bones, and then she’s dancing with a demon in Ravengard’s yard: clack-clack, clack-clack, the flashing foil bludgeoning the stick. She’s never parried so fast in her life. The Duke moves in ways that, for anyone else’s get, would not be possible—as though their blade is alive and after her, darting where she most fears for it to go, and only their indulgent grasp of the hilt dissuades it from running her through.
They’ve still got their damned arm behind their back. Florrick grits her teeth, shaken, sweating in her furs—
“My goodness,” gasps the Bhaalspawn, putting up the beastly foil. Sweat’s plastered a shock of their hair to their face. “Enough of that. With you about, Florrick”—with a wheezy laugh, they steady themself on Wyll’s shoulder—“why do we spend money on the Fists?”
* * *
“Perhaps,” says Ulder Ravengard with supreme tact, reaching across his writing-table for the carafe, “you would like a cup of chocolate?”
He’s never seen Florrick out of breath. If her chambers burned down around her, he doubts she would lose her composure enough to cough. She looks at him now like one of the wild-eyed haggards that perch on patriars’ wrists.
“By the living gods,” she says—winded, almost laughing. When he pours her the cup of chocolate, she drinks it off. “I hope never to battle a child of Bhaal again!”