He enters the cracked ballroom with a dancer's grace, sweeping his feet over the debris and circling her with his slender blade pointed at her throat, eight paces away.
‘So you stayed,’ he says. The creak and yaw of operating catapults outside the city adds percussion to the din of battle outside the shattered windows. ‘Fool,’ he says with a venomous twist of a smile. ‘I will not just kill you here, mercenary. I will slash apart your armour, throw your weapon from the battlements, cut you skin to ribbons, flense the flesh from your bones, sever the tendons from their hooks and watch you writhe in exquisite agony on the dusty floor of this ruined place. You friends will know your last moments were spent begging for the sweet release of death, that you looked up to me as a benevolent god of dark release, and when you- are- sorry, are you eating?’
‘Yesh,’ she says, a handful of bread stuffed in her mouth. ‘I’m fumking storving,’ she says between big chews that display the half-eaten mush between her teeth.
‘You insolent cur,’ he hisses through bared teeth. ‘Have you no shame?’
She swallows. ‘I have a lot to do today,’ she says, brushing the crumbs from her breastplate. ‘After I’ve killed you, I’ve got to storm that keep, and that’s going to take hours. So I’m not going to get another chance to eat until at least tomorrow. Anyway, you were saying something?’
His jaw is slack and his sword droops. Then he shakes himself to his senses and that vicious sneer returns to his lips, as the sword jumps back up to point at her throat. ‘You would do well to remember your fear, for it is the last thing you will- agh!’
His body is thrown back across the room as a thunderous crack sounds and smoke billows into the air. She replaces the flintlock in her belt and pulls and apple from her pouch. ‘Sure thing,’ she says, before taking a bite.
Paddy Dobson
23rd August 2022