Once A Hero Read Free

welcomed me as if I were indeed the champion for whom they waited. I asked to take possession of Cleaveheart immediately, but the abbess avowed that Jistan had specified a number of rituals before the blade could be given over to my keeping.
    I pressed her on this point. "I'm thinking, good Sister Constance, that Most High Jistan would understand about the urgency of the situation."
    "Were that true, Neal Roclawzi, he would have given us a sign." Her face closed up in all the sign I needed to know I was doomed to wait.
    Tashayul and his Skull-riders arrived as I was sleeping off a long ride and a full meal. The nuns, given the choice between death or surrender of the sword and my person, found themselves divinely inspired to declare me a heretic. This they did while I slumbered. I awoke from a dream about wrestling a snake to find myself bound hand and foot.
    Standing beside the abbess, I watched from a balcony as a trio of nuns bore Cleaveheart to Tashayul. "No rituals, Sister?"
    "We have had our sign, Neal Snaketongue." The nun eyed me sternly. "If you are truly Jistan's champion, He, in His divine wisdom, will find a way to unite you with the blade."
    Watching Tashayul take practice cuts down in the courtyard, I had a feeling he, too, had a way to unite me with the blade, causing me to wonder if what I had taken as good omens were not so good after all. With the dawn's rose light glowing from the long serpentine blade's single razor edge, and the sword whistling as it sliced the air, wondering became knowing and I knew I'd seen my last dawn.
    Two of Tashayul's guards accepted custody of me from the nuns and brought me down into the convent's courtyard. I towered over both my warders, but that was to be expected, as Reithrese tend to be slightly shorter than the average man. Even so their stocky Reithrese builds mocked my gangling limbs. In the few combats I had fought against their kind, my quickness and reach had made up for what I surrendered to them in strength. Hobbled by a short length of rope and with my arms bound behind me, those advantages went the way of my faith in Jistan.
    Coming into the courtyard, perspective on, Tashayul changed and with it changed my assessment of him. Unlike his fellows, Tashayul and I could see eye to eye, which made him quite remarkable among the Reithrese. Stripped to the waist, Tashayul moved quickly and smoothly, with thick muscles sliding effortlessly beneath sweat-sheened skin that had been darkened by long exposure to the sun. His black hair had been pulled back into a ponytail that fell midway down his spine. Successful cuts at imaginary foes brought a smile to his face, peeling his lips back to reveal a mouth full of emerald teeth.
    A booted foot applied to the back of my legs drove me to my knees in front of Tashayul. The Reithrese slashed the blade within a hair's-breadth of my nose, then sheathed Cleaveheart in one fluid, practiced motion. He took my straight, double-edged sword from one of his human slaves and bared it. He flipped it over and back, then tested the weight of it in his sword hand. He sighted down the edges of the blade, then leaned on the sword as if it were a cane and he a Kaudian dandy on a seaside promenade.
    "You meant to kill me with this?" His voice came as hard as his dark-eyed stare, but I caught in both a theatricality meant to frighten me mightily.
    "You should not be thinking that, m'lord. 'Tis a mountain tradition to be inscribing the name of a warrior one wishes to honor on a blade." I tried to smile up at him, but one of the guards crashed a backhanded cuff over my right ear.
    Tashayul frowned at the soldier and shook his head. "I take it the telling of tall tales is another Roclawzi tradition? Or are you not this Neal of which my spies have told me?" He opened his arms, pointing my sword skyward, and took in the whole of the aging monastery with his gesture "Is this not the place where you said you would kill me?"
    "I said nothing of the kind,