Chapter 54 - The Farm in Irttat
Chapter 54: Flame in the Swamp 10
Primavera's personal guard reacted quickly. Both stepped forward in unison, raising their swords in a cross-block: "Look out!"
The city lord stumbled back several steps, caught herself, and her expression darkened: “A child with no manners whatsoever. When your family comes looking for you, they can't blame me for fighting back then!”
The answer she received was a sustained blur of sword light.
Lucita stood entirely unguarded in the middle of an array of armor and shields, looking especially slight and vulnerable, every angle seeming to offer a point of attack.
Sword light bore in from every direction, each strike trailing a faint whisper of air, clear and distinct. Lucita's ears twitched. A back-flip, and she used the blades themselves as footholds to spring out of the encirclement.
Her dark eyes swept across the group. Through the Eye of True Sight, the movements of the sword edges became clear and unhurried.
The assault slackened briefly, then overlapping blades came at her again. Some of the thrusts came from particularly awkward angles. Lucita, lacking formal combat technique, was fractionally slow in avoiding one, and a shallow cut opened across the side of her face.
Her brow furrowed slightly. She increased the force of her responses, weaving between the blades, deflecting attacks with her sword, and using the momentum to drive her boot into a knight's chest.
Her sword seemed to serve only as a defensive tool. Time and again, her blade reached someone’s throat, then veered aside by a hair’s breadth, letting them go.
Every knight on the ground had been sent there by a kick.
After several rounds of this, the knights all noticed she wasn’t trying to kill them, and a certain recklessness crept in. They scrambled back to their feet, steadied themselves, and charged again with their swords raised.
A red-haired knight wiped her face, hauled herself upright, and thrust at Lucita's back with a laugh: "This little chick has never seen blood before, has she —"
The words weren't out of her mouth before Lucita had already turned and driven her blade through.
The knight didn’t register what had happened at first. The sword had passed through her abdomen, and blood spattered across the marble-paved ground.
She stared at the dark-haired youth who had turned back with cold, flat eyes, her own eyes going wide, a strange sound escaping her throat.
Lucita withdrew the sword. The woman slowly folded to the ground, and wasn't moving anymore.
Silence fell.
The memory of those earlier passes of blade across the throat returned to every knight at once. Fear began to spread. No one dared raise their sword again.
In those moments when they had been pushed to the brink, their courage had been borrowed from Lucita’s mercy. Now that mercy was gone. Their momentum broke, and faced with an opponent so clearly stronger than themselves, the cool, lucid fear of death crept back in.
Lucita's boots crossed the grey-white stone, advancing steadily.
Someone took a step back first, then the knights began to withdraw one by one.
They watched as this intruder barely glanced at them, as though they were no longer worth her attention, and began calmly wiping the blade. The thin cut across her face was seeping red, standing out sharply.
Behind the retreating crowd, the city lord's expression was dark. She leaned down and murmured something to an attendant at her side.
The attendant nodded as she listened, and was turning to leave when a longsword came slicing through the air out of nowhere, drove through the stone pavers, and planted itself deep in the ground squarely in front of her path.
The attendant stumbled back in terror and spun around. Lucita had already risen on the wind and cleared the distance in a single vault, landing behind the city lord, one hand closing around her throat.
The city lord of Primavera was forced to tilt her head back, her entire body pinned in Lucita’s grip. Looking down, she could see blood still spattered across the youth’s cuffs, and did not dare move.
Only then did Lucita turn her head toward the attendant, giving a slight tilt of her chin: "Were you going to the dungeons to bring them out as hostages?"
The attendant could hardly admit it. She shook her head frantically, too terrified even to form a denial.
But Lucita was indifferent to the answer: "Go now then. Bring them out, and I'll consider releasing your city lord."
The attendant hesitated a fraction of a second. Lucita tightened her grip. The Primavera city lord's face went red immediately, a strangled sound escaping her.
Everyone present had already been on the receiving end of this, no one doubted the strength in that hand.
And given the nerve of someone who had walked into this place alone without a trace of fear, as well as her background which they had not yet placed but which must be formidable, even the city lord herself could not be certain, trading on the Primavera name, whether this person would actually go through with killing her.
Lucita's hand eased slightly. The city lord rasped out, voice hoarse: "Khh-khh… go! Now!"
When Kelsey appeared, she was being held up by someone on either side. Her white shirt was soaked and torn with bloodstains in multiple places, her expression utterly spent. She looked to be exhaling more than she was inhaling.
Stasia’s condition was somewhat better. She had no visible injuries, but she was haggard and exhausted. The moment her eyes found the city lord, a ferocious flash of hatred lit them.
Catching sight of Lucita, Stasia felt the tension leave her all at once. Then, taking in the state of the courtyard, she couldn’t help crying out in anguish: "Lucita!"
Delphine, hovering nearby, drew a sharp breath and almost couldn't bring herself to look at Lucita.
Lucita's hand tightened instinctively, the veins on the back of it standing out, her grip making the city lord's eyes roll back.
She forced out three words, low and quiet: "Everyone stand aside."
The attendants released the two women’s arms that had been pinned behind their backs. Kelsey staggered. Stasia caught her immediately.
Lucita led the way out with the city lord in her grip. Stasia and Kelsey followed, leaning on each other.
A crowd trailed them all the way to the gate. Lucita drove back the mass of knights, permitting only a single attendant to come along to arrange their departure from the city.
The city lord tried to object. Lucita cut her off with a single line: "No matter how many people come with me, I can kill as many as I like." And that was the end of it.
Lucita requisitioned a horse. Stasia mounted with Kelsey, who was barely conscious, behind her. At last, when they had reached the city gates and the watching crowd had held their stare for a long time as they rode away, Lucita finally released her grip.
She requisitioned another horse for herself, and as she swung up into the saddle she looked back: "Thank you for letting your guards practice swordwork with me. After a few rounds I feel considerably more comfortable with the blade."
"I do hope there's another opportunity to spar with your guards sometime."
Then, entirely indifferent to the city lord's grinding, furious glare, she urged the horse through the gates and out of the city, leaving behind a rolling cloud of dust.
The disheveled city lord stood at the city gates, staring out at the vast wilderness beyond, her eyes narrowing.
Without finding out where this self-styled "Cameron" had come from, this matter was far from over.
Lucita found the other two in the deep forest they had passed through on the way in.
The forest lay midway between Grande and Pharos, their only route back. During their earlier overnight camp, they had discovered a fairly deep cave. Lucita followed the path and found them there, just as she expected.
When she found Stasia, she looked tense, sword in hand, every nerve focused on the cave entrance. At the sight of Lucita she exhaled in relief, leaned on her sword, and slid down the cave wall to sit on the ground.
Lucita looked first toward Kelsey, who was unconscious on one side, and felt for her breath — still there. She was not going to die any time soon.
And any external injuries that wouldn't kill her, Lucita could heal.
She bent down and assessed Kelsey's wounds.
All she could say was that Stasia lived up to her reputation as a surgeon. She had already dressed the injuries with what she had available. The bandages were torn from clothing, but the work was neat and careful.
Lucita reached out to remove the dressings, and Stasia gripped her arm in alarm: "What are you doing?"
Lucita didn’t know how to explain. She simply pressed her fingers to the cut on her own left cheek, then held them up for Stasia to see, her skin already fully restored.
"Like that," Lucita said. "I'll try to close her wounds."
Stasia stared, watching Lucita begin unwrapping Kelsey's bandages, and asked after a moment: "Who... are you, exactly?"
The residents of Irttat were non-human, yes. There were elves, yes. Merfolk, yes. But none of them looked human while simultaneously possessing so many baffling traits and abilities the way Lucita did.
"Honestly, I don't know myself." Lucita's hands kept moving. Her voice was calm.
Kelsey's injuries were severe. Several cuts deep enough to show bone, a stab wound to the abdomen, and considerable damage to the skin in addition to all of that.
This was the most serious injury Lucita had attempted to heal since first discovering her healing gift.
She worked through every wound with care. The shallower ones had already begun to close with new flesh; the deepest had stopped bleeding, with significant tissue regeneration.
This was the limit of what Lucita could do at present. There were too many wounds. By the time she finished, strain had crept into her face.
“Give her something to eat,” Lucita said. “Quickly. I can only draw on the energy in her own body to help her heal. Whatever is expended is hers, and she needs to replenish it urgently.”
"Right, right." Stasia answered in the hurried manner of a worried family member, and pulled a jar of thick soup sweetened with beet juice from her storage necklace, ladling it into a small bowl and feeding it to Kelsey spoonful by spoonful.
It was fortunate those shell necklaces had not been taken. They had kept them on at all times, and it was the food stored inside that had allowed Kelsey to hold on long enough to survive.
Once everything had been settled, Lucita asked Stasia what had happened.
Stasia's expression grew somber: “We thought she had summoned us because she wanted treatment. So even though the knights she sent were unpleasant, we went along without much concern.”
“Then she asked me for the formula. She said she wanted to save Grande.”
"I told her the final tests hadn't been completed, that I needed another couple of days to evaluate the results of a few formulas. She refused to believe me, and began making physical threats. At that point I understood, her purposes were not simple."
"Perhaps because she was certain we couldn't get out the door, we soon learned her real objective."
"She wanted to use the formula to restore the Primavera Duke's power in the military. You know how the relationship between Spring and Kenting has been difficult these past years. A plague that spreads easily, though with low mortality, but with a cure held by only one person... Do you understand how terrifying that becomes the moment someone decides to weaponize it? She was mad."
Power truly is a thing with the capacity to beguile.
It can turn black into white, ugly into beautiful, wrong into right, menial into noble, old into young, coward into warrior.
And it could turn the descendants of the Primavera General, that brilliant and fearless woman who had fought on the battlefield ten years ago with a vow to break the old world, into something unrecognizable.
“Originally, I withheld the two final tested formulas out of concern for my own safety,” Stasia continued. “But after hearing that, I understood. I couldn’t say a single word.”
"Kelsey was used to pressure me into it, and this was the result. But I still didn't say anything."
Stasia paused here, lowered her gaze, and brushed her fingers gently across Kelsey's forehead.
In her sleep, Kelsey seemed to be trapped in something unpleasant. Her brow was drawn tight.
Stasia's voice trembled slightly: "Lucita. Perhaps you don't understand. People cannot survive a second war."
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