The warlord didn't stay snarled in the debris for long, he was back on his feet. The boat churned and threw the fighters this way and that as the storm raged. Blood, seawater and rain were under Ryheric's boots and slippery at the grip of his sword, but he didn't falter now. Perhaps he couldn't. Retreat and fear were ripped away from him, just like anything he'd ever tried to keep. Everything was red and black, now. Wrath, hunger for blood and willful abandonment of control.
The long, curved Southern style blade was brought to bear. Strike after strike came, so ferocious that orange sparks flew between the clashing steel, battle-axe versus that twice-chipped blade. Weapons of warlords meeting like thunder and fire in this unlikely habitat. They were on the deck of a stolen ship with broken sails, in the middle of a storm.
If there were any onlooker to witness, they might have called the contest magnificent. The older champion, edging away from his prime and the upstart student grazing the beginnings of his own, both cruelly deadly, both men made for nothing else - just wrath and blood, colliding in such a dance as might never be seen again.
The next strike belonged to Ryheric, and it was not the killing strike, but it caused a stagger in his opponent, a grievous wound struck to his head before by inches the other man managed to tear away from the worst of it. But despite this hopeful turn, Ryheric had already been severely hit by that massive axe blade in his right shoulder at the very start of the fight, when he'd wanted - for the sake of his friends and all he had learned in the West - to avoid a fight at all, and he bled all the while. His consciousness was already beginning to fray. Green for sleep, black to let go and give in to it.
The warm stream of blood down his right side contrasted with the icy winter rain. He suffered a winding when his old mentor, now enemy, struck around with the handle of the axe, the hit to the sternum knocking him onto his back and the shower of splinters and wood bits on the deck.
He almost kept sliding due to the tilt of the ship upon a great wave, but through some mercy of his lucky stars or the simple last wind of adrenaline after the hours of this final duel to the death, he rolled to his feet. The curved blade was driven forward in a strike that was outright mad. A man who knew he would die, and possessively grabbed hold of his last wind. Rabid for it.
He wouldn't keep it. Just like he could not keep anything in his life. But he would have this last wind, this moment would belong to him forever.
The warlord's footing failed him due to the blow to his head, and Ryheric's blade struck through flesh and wood of a door behind the man he had, somewhere in his heart, always seen as a father.
The grizzled warlord knew in the final few seconds then, that he was already dead. It merely took those seconds for the life to exit him, and he stared at Ryheric's face. A hard stare that flew into vacancy as the last enraged spasms of life left him, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth as he was then slain.
Rain. Blood. The winter sea. The slippery deck.
It was another memory. His bare form wrenched up in another cold sweat. His pulse hard in his ears. The flashbacks had been growing much worse, lately. His right shoulder stung as it had done for more than a year since he had almost lost that arm to his mentor's axe aboard that war-tossed ship.
But the slippery deck was just the smooth wrap of his bed roll about him. No one bled. It wasn't raining. Indeed, it was a beautiful summer day just outside of Combe. Birds sung, everything was green and khaki green - Bree's colour in his perception. The colour of sleep and inebriation.
He was alone and he had survived.
Son of Mouse raised his head from nearby, ears pricked as his jaw churned to munch the lush grass.
Ryheric regarded the black colt in his usual sidelong way from his bed roll, and they shared a momentary stare. Mutual regard, Kacis, "Escape" as Ryheric decided was the colt's secret name, but what was the point of forming attachments? It was all more to lose. What was another lute? What was another friend? Another mentor? Another lover?
"Curse you, Kacis. What is another horse?"
He insincerely cursed Son of Mouse under his breath, as though it were the colt's fault he'd lost Boltin, and everything else. Kacis went back to grazing, peacefully flicking his tail without caring a whit. The colt hadn't known his new master a single day where he hadn't woken violently to some relived horror or another. But Ryheric treated the beast well, and cared for his injury just as Greengrove had instructed. The horse had no reason to take the man's private anguishes as anything frightening or unusual.
Ryheric pushed it all aside, Then he rose, bathed in the crystal clear pond and prepared for the next day. They had found the body of the lumber man, more questions had been raised.
There was plenty more to do than hold on to things he shouldn't keep.
