Readjusting the frilliest dress she had ever worn, for the day of the duel, Amelia fiddled with the jewels bedazzling its length from collar to base to keep herself distracted while waiting.
“Here, good as new,” Grace said from beside her. She was holding a doll, which had lost some of its stuffing during Stanton’s fight with the Marquess of Rutherford’s knight.
“Sorry, I’ll be more careful with it,” said Amelia, hugging the doll Grace had enchanted to help her through the day’s stress. A boon like no other, though not one impervious to having its cotton squeezed out when handled with far too much care.
Grace simply moved closer, discreetly wrapping her arm around Amelia’s waist in a comforting gesture.
“Feeling hungry?” Martel asked Amelia, for the tenth time that day, as she offered from a tin a fine selection of candies made to look like rubies and diamonds.
Amelia partook with a quiet “thank you”, and tried not to get emotional as the candies began to flood her mouth with their sweetness. Even that very morning, all it had taken was for her to mention a desire to feel pretty and the two women had gone the distance to ensure that it happened.
“I’m awfully glad Stanton’s fight ended well,” Amelia said, placing the doll in the crook of her arm so she could continue weaving the circlet of flowers she had decided to make.
“I suppose he did alright,” Grace said laconically. She gave Amelia another flower, conjured from thin air, “Though I still think he could have been less gory about it… Or have worn his usual armor.”
“Pish-posh,” Martel said in disagreement, “Our lady wanted him shielded and the boy chose to interpret her words by wearing full plate.” She poked the circlet Amelia was making, “I have to say… That’s pretty well-made.”
Amelia held up the circlet of flowers to inspect her work. Secretly, she took a peek through its colors towards the erected wooden stands where the Marquess of Rutherford could be found sitting like a statue in his seat. The foreign prince lounged nearby, fanned by two muscular servants.
“My mom taught me,” Amelia said quietly, wishing she could know why the prince looked more annoyed than the Marquess. It was as if the royal wished he could be anywhere else.
Their eyes met through the flowers. The prince lazily blew her a kiss, wrapped in a wink. Amelia shrunk back into her seat. If the Historian’s novel could be trusted, then he was probably simply acting the flirt, but after what had happened beneath the Coliseum… The idea of interacting with anyone even remotely involved with the Marquess of Rutherford felt like a vice-grip on her heart.
“Is he someone you know?” Grace asked, as she slid her hand from hip onto leg to pull Amelia closer.
“Nope,” Amelia said, happy to ignore the prince in favor of Grace. She still had a mind to petition the royal with a deal to overthrow his elder brother after the duel, but that could only happen if his aspirations to establish himself in the ruins of the Velvetican kingdom were sufficiently crushed. She just needed to wait… and approach the prince in a safe manner. No more going off by herself. Bad things tended to happen whenever she did.
Her decision to do so, lessened the vice-grip.
Grace leaned forward, to better look between the Prince and Amelia, “Don’t you think it’s kind of… different, how he’s not wearing a shirt?”
Caught off guard, Amelia bit her lower lip in annoyance. It felt like Grace had been a thought away from calling the prince ‘hot’. It disgruntled her, since she agreed that in his loose flowing clothes the prince appeared especially… She wasn’t one to use the word ‘tasty’, but enough romance novels told her the descriptor was apt.
Martel tapped her shoulder, providing an escape route from the jealousy Amelia hadn’t realised she was capable of.
“Sounds like the Marquess of Rutherford will be sending out a hired mercenary next. But it’s not the Leviathan.”
“Really?” Amelia said, relieved to know they could stick to their planned line up: Stanton to first test the waters, then whoever her father had found since they had won, followed by her father himself as their lynchpin against the Marques’s ace, should they lose in the second.
But why was the Marquess of Rutherford sending out a random mercenary? Was it because Stanton had trounced his Knight?
The answer, revealed itself as the Alchemist Richter exited the Marquess’s tent. Ducking under the ropes of the dueling grounds, he lifted the barrier from the other side, allowing a shambling beggar who looked two steps from death, to limp onto the field unimpeded.
Grace retched with a hand over her mouth. “There’s something foul about that one… He smells like tainted magic, although I don’t know how such a thing could possibly be.”
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The fact the Marquess of Rutherford might be cheating, mattered little to Amelia, who reasoned Richter could probably spin whatever he was up to as ‘Science’ rather than ‘Magic’, thereby skirting the rules of the duel.
A part of her still hoped her father’s fighter might be able to wipe the smug look from Richter’s face, but as Amelia watched four men carry out an immense battle axe for the ‘mercenary’ wearing nothing but rags, she reasoned the fight might already be over, when the sickly man lifted the weapon over his shoulder using an arm nearly as thin as her own.
So, when her father’s tent opened and a thin, bespectacled person she knew well strutted outside, dressed like he was ready for a hard day’s work of accounting, it took the combined force of Grace and Martel to hold Amelia down in her seat.
“H-Heimdall?!” Amelia stammered, “T-That’s Heimdall! My father’s aid! I knew I heard him earlier; he should be back home… W-What is he doing here?”
Grace held Amelia’s trembling hands as Heimdall walked the full circumference of the field. Bizarrely, he patted each wooden post marking the grounds as he did, before making his way to the center.
“Is he a good fighter?”
“Heimdall? A good fighter? The question gave Amelia a reason to pause. But even after revisiting every memory she had of the man, Amelia struggled to find a single example of Heimdall being remotely capable of dishing out violence. This was the kind-hearted soul who would always ask her whether she had brushed her teeth before bed, the man she thought of as a second father who was always willing to help her find a new book. To her, Heimdall was a scholar. A self-made gentleman of fine learning.
Of course, he had been willing to pull a gun and dagger on her father during their family’s dinner fiasco, but hadn’t he done that out of principle? Actually… How many people were there who could pull a gun on her father? She watched Heimdall politely bow in their direction, and then he was off, with nothing more than a satchel towards the beggar who howled as Richter injected him with a syringe.
A madness seemed to take over the man. His muscles began writhing like snakes under skin as he grew. With each passing second the beggar seemed less and less human, and more like a shuddering mass of pulsating flesh.
Richter backed away from the field. Not straying far, he proudly kept watch over his creation that dropped its axe to begin clawing at its own exposed skin.
“It’s starting,” Martel said, as the round’s trumpet blew loudly.
“I… I can’t watch,” Amelia gasped, unwilling to imagine Heimdall getting hurt for her sake.
Heimdall, appeared relatively unbothered by the hulk that dropped on all fours to retrieve its axe. Squatting down on the grass, he opened his satchel and began to calmly dig through it.
“Move! Please!” Amelia screamed, as the beggar, with his axe dragging behind it, sprinted towards Heimdall. The crowd took Amelia’s shout to decide something was wrong. One person even laughed, as if amused by the slaughter that would surely descend alongside the axe the beggar raised high.
Squinting against the sun, Heimdal tilted his head to lazily consider the guillotine that began to descend. Amidst the collective held breath of all those who watched, Amelia managed to hear Heimdall speak to himself over the distance.
“What a pain in the ass,” Heimdall said, as he pulled out from his satchel a hank made from the finest of hairs, along with a knife.
He darted forwards, keeping his centre of gravity low to avoid the axe’s downswing. Stepping in, Heimdall without blinking shoved the tip of his knife into the beggar’s belly and slashed the blade horizontally free. The beggar’s impressive size began working against him, as the weight of his guts caused them to begin spilling out.
Amelia, as the gore hissed unnaturally, found herself thinking that Heimdall’s movement had looked incredibly practiced. It was almost as if the man had been preparing himself to take down a foe much larger than himself for a very, very long time.
Though it didn’t look like Heimdall had expected the beggar to ignore the gaping wound as if he were impervious to pain. Since he barely managed to react and dodge the second, much more frenetic attempt on his life.
Seemingly panicked, Heimdall threw his knife. It went wide, not even close to hitting its mark… But Amelia thought for sure she could guess what Heimdall was up to, as the spool of string Heimdall held began to unravel.
The knife, attached to the string at its hilt, turned around in mid-air as Heimdall pulled hard. Amelia gasped, while the crowd…. stared open mouth, as the knife missed once again and returned to land in front of its owner.
Heimdall, like an elderly man, slowly bent low to reach for his weapon. While his opponent took advantage of his apparent misfortune.
“No!” Amelia shouted, as a cloud of dirt exploded around the two men as the beggar axe fell once again. Their figures now shrouded, the outcome unknown, Amelia’s shriek hadn’t even finished before Heimdall burst from the haze to begin levitating, of all things, above the dust.
“That’s cheating!” Amelia heard Richter yell, “We said no magic!”
“It isn’t magic,” Grace said, sounding offended that anyone would think so.
“K-Kinda looks like it!” Amelia said flabbergasted, before Grace reached out to share a spark of her magic, allowing Amelia’s eyes to better see what faintly glittered as the dust continued to settle.
Heimdall, was balancing on a string; a diameter of webbing connected by the posts roping off the dueling ground’s zone. Somehow, the field had been strung up like a spider had made the field home.
“That’s still cheating!” Richter shouted, before adding with a mix of desperation and a want to know more, “What kind of string is that?!”
“They’re just dragon tendons,” Heimdall said. He began looping his knife between his cord of string, like he was getting ready to put it away. As he did, a single vertical string shimmered into view… Revealing to all in attendance the trap that forced the beggar to tilt his head up.
Heimdall hadn’t missed, he had thrown his knife to loop it round the man’s head.
Without smugness or gloating, Heimdall shrugged towards Richter as he continued to reel in his struggling fish. “And the rules didn’t say anything about prepping the field,” he added, before Heimdall stepped off his perch, becoming the counterweight that made the beggar’s eyes bulge, just before the string round his neck sliced itself shut.
Landing as light as a cat, Heimdall raised both hands in the air as both a head and a beggar fell to thud and roll on the grass.
Before the trumpet could sound to announce the duel’s winner, Heimdall faced where the Marquess of Rutherford stewed in an anger he could no longer hide, and said, as if mocking the noble:
“I surrender.”