Arc 6: Chapter 4: Melee
Twenty fighters filled the tunnel. The humid early summer air stank of leather, oil, and human bodies.
The people around me were a far cry from the gleaming stock who’d acted as accessories to Evangeline Ark’s joust. These were freeswords, adventurers, third and fourth sons from lesser families eager to make a name for themselves in a world where wealth so often bought one prestige. There were a crop of proper knights, clad in full plate like mine with distinctive helmets and brightly dyed cloth. Just as many would have looked at home in a band of brigands, though all made at least some concession for theater.
A brawny man who’d dressed himself like a coastal marauder, complete with a crudely beaten iron helm sporting twin horns, was in the middle of regaling the group with some story as I took up position among them. His bristling black beard erupted from the open faced helmet, and he rested a hefty flat-bladed axe, just as crude and impractical as the helm, on one shoulder.
There, I thought. Knew I wouldn’t be the only one.
“Aye, it’s a good show!” He said in a spitting bluster. “A very good show, yes indeed. Haven’t seen its like in some time. Remember lads, when they open those gates, all’s fair. No hard feelings! Ha!”
He spoke in an accent common among the rugged folk who populated the subcontinent’s southeastern shores. At least, he made an earnest attempt at it. I’d had some exposure to the dialect. They tended to roam the winding rivers of Urn on sleek ships as traders, sometimes as raiders, and held a number of small kingdoms not far to the south of Elfhome.
I highly doubted this hairy axeman was actually from Alheid, but I couldn’t begrudge him a bit of playacting. Especially since it would be hypocritical.
“Ah, and the Black Knight himself joins us!” The probably-fake sea raider let out a booming laugh as he turned to me. “Should I take it that means our team has been cast as the villains this time?”
One of the knights among that misfit band eyed me up and down. His visor was raised, giving me a glimpse of a young face with lazy eyes and a snub nose. Others turned to glance at me as well, and many shifted nervously. I imagined I cut a gloomy figure.
But hardly the most eccentric one. Besides the marauder, the group contained a particularly stunted dwarf no taller than nine feet, who kept to the back and hunched as though fearful someone might notice him. He wore a lumpy helm and not enough armor, as though whatever rural village he hailed from hadn’t been able to produce enough metal to outfit him properly. A cat-eyed youth in green who I suspected was a changeling kept trying to flirt with a scarred woman with spiked hair and a single pauldron onto which the carving of a weeping maiden had been chained.
Lovely bunch.