Total pages in book: 109
Estimated words: 104842 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 524(@200wpm)___ 419(@250wpm)___ 349(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 104842 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 524(@200wpm)___ 419(@250wpm)___ 349(@300wpm)
Looking at it closer, watching the man twitching on the end of the blade, I recognized the karambit in his hand, as guys I’d known in the service had carried them.
There was yelling as Cirillo, who was far smaller than the guy attacking him, lifted the man up off his feet and flung him across the room, his neck sliced from ear to ear.
“Shit,” I gasped, as the girl ran to the guy closest to her, who was still staring at Cirillo, and tried to pull the sword from the sheath on his belt.
He backhanded her hard and pulled his sword to kill her, but I put an elbow in his face, got the spatha from him, and swung, taking off his head.
Along with everything else that had been on my long list of duties at the palace as cadeyrn, Zev had insisted on teaching me some basic sword skills. I was trained in close-quarter tactics, I knew how to use a knife, but those weren’t the same. There was a discipline to sword fighting, so many fixed positions that Zev always made look fluid. My attack was rudimentary at best, but the man fell and arterial blood sprayed everywhere the same as it had when Cirillo killed his man.
“Jason,” he barked. I saw the third guy running away.
I tossed Cirillo the sword, and he caught it by the hilt like we’d been perfecting this maneuver for years, leaped over the fleeing man, and when he landed, had the sword sticking out behind him so the guy charged directly into the blade, impaling himself.
He crumpled to the ground, and Cirillo yanked the sword out to the sound of the last painful gasp of the dying man. Cirillo made ready to cut off his head, but the young woman—she couldn’t have been more than sixteen, seventeen—waved her hands at Cirillo and spoke to him in a rush of Old Norse.
“Good to know,” he said, then to me, “both the iceni and the huskar, apparently that’s the class between the iceni and the nobles—no soldiers here, only people on retainer to the nobles—don’t need their heads cut off. They die just like you humans.”
“Great,” I said sarcastically. “Where did you get that knife?”
“I always have many on me, and unless you know what you’re looking for, you’ll never find them.”
He sounded like Zev, who always had some small, lethal blade on him somewhere.
Quick scowl from him. “Did Tiago tell you that all I did on the battlefield was warm Varic’s bed?”
“Maybe we don’t talk about Varic’s bed,” I suggested.
“I fought too,” he said defensively. “Now, am I more assassin than a warrior who engages in hand-to-hand combat? Yes. But—”
The girl grabbed my wrist and tugged, and when I looked at her, she used her hand to present the three dead men on the floor, like Ta-da! That, combined with her annoyed expression, told me what she thought of me and Cirillo.
“She thinks we’re idiots,” I told him.
“Well, we are, in fact, not running.”
We followed her then, out the back of the large storage shed, behind several buildings, through an outdoor market with fruits, vegetables, flowers, and fish. Lots of different fish, which surprised me because when I’d researched Greenland, I learned there was a big fishing industry in the south, but we were very much in the north. I was expecting to see only arctic char. But since people had been living in Ophir for a long time, they probably farmed fish—something I hadn’t considered and that hadn’t appeared in my research due to the isolated nature of the place. And even if most of the morals from Jurassic Park were lost on us, we did come away with Jeff Goldblum’s pearl that life always did find a way.
Once we neared the edge of the market, the girl led us to a stall where people were selling boots.
“Look at this,” I told Cirillo. “Things are already looking up.”
He gave me a shrug in response.
When the girl lifted the pass-through, we followed, and two girls who had to be her sisters—going by similarity of features—started shouting at her, their concern crossing the language barrier. She rushed into her mother’s arms, who immediately dissolved into tears. Her father, a very large, muscular, barrel-chested man, joined his wife and daughter and listened as she rattled off her story, gesturing frantically at us throughout the recounting.
All three turned to us, the girls who had been in the front joined us, and all five were now staring at us.
Cirillo smiled, all the women sighed, and the girl’s father offered me his hand. I glanced over at my partner in crime.
“You’re the one who removed the guy’s head before he could take hers,” he pointed out. “Her father’s going to like you best.”
“That’s true, but you killed more,” I reminded him as I shook her father’s hand, covering his one with both of mine.