A Man Alone

Part One: Kain

The four gathered at the table were an odd collection, with nearly nothing in common between them. Kara was the youngest by several years, her long hair pulled back in to two peasant-braids, wearing a simple tunic and boy's breeches. She didn't look the part of a commander or fighter; she barely looked old enough to be done climbing trees and skinning her knees with friends. She was the only one who'd had time to clean up after battle, and so despite some bruises on her arms, one could never tell the sort of bloody melee she'd just finished.

To her left was Kaiya, who looked every part the fighter that Kara didn't. She was tall, particularly for a woman; her skin was an earthy shade of brown and her yellow eyes were always suspicious. She wore a breastplate and arm guards, and more armor on the field, where Kara always kept her armor very light—she only wore what Daevan forced her to. Her hair was a mess, her skin and clothes soaked with sweat, and a general fatigue hung over her.

Daevan sat on Kara's other side, his chin length hair still pulled into a short pony-tail from the battle, spilling short curls out the end, with blood and dirt still caked in to his clothing and skin. He was exhausted, though unscathed, for the most part, and he'd stripped out of his light armor, leaving a rust-stained gray undershirt and black leather pants. He also wore a pair of matched, worn black leather gloves.

The fourth member of the group was also battleworn, but his blond hair was down, aside from the band that held it out of his eyes. His armor echoed Kaiya's, but he also carried a broadsword, larger than most in frequent use. He was probably the prettiest of the group, though far from girlish; Daevan was more traditionally handsome, with dark curls and gray, piercing eyes.

"It's time, Daevan," Arant said.

Daevan nodded. "Just... Just give a minute to collect my thoughts." He drummed his fingers against the table. "And I need you to believe me; some of the things I've done sound impossible and most of them are awful, but I need you to understand that I'm not lying. Not this time."

"We know," Arant agreed. "Don't worry, you said you'd tell us everything, and we trust you."

"Speak for yourself," Kaiya muttered.

Daevan rolled his eyes. "All right. In that case... I suppose my first memory was my mother's death."

"I'm sorry," Kara said, reaching across the table to place a hand over his. "Was she sick?"

"No," he said, squeezing her hand slightly before releasing it, "my father killed her. See, the thing about Dad is that he hates women. Hates them with the kind of passion that I've only ever seen... Well, the kind of passion that Kaiya reserves for me." He half-smiled at her and she glared back. "I don't know why it happened. I think his mother probably did terrible things to him or something. But Dad absolute hates women.

"I was.... Three, maybe four years old. He kept my mother around that long—she had been his favorite pet whore when she got pregnant, he needed an Heir to train and wanted it to be his own blood so he didn't just kill her to begin with, and he needed her to nurse me. But as soon as he could...

"He beat her senseless while I was watching, and then snapped her neck. That's the first thing I ever remember. She yelled out my name right before her killed her. He dropped her body and turned to me and said, 'That's all she was worth, Daevan.'" He paused for a deep breath. His voice was tired, but not emotional, this was a story mild in comparison to things he'd live through later, and he had long ago stopped feeling anything when he thought of either of his parents.

"Oh, Daevan," Kara whispered. "I'm sorry, that's..."

"Don't," he said. "It's all right. I don't give a damn about my father now, and my mother... Well, I never knew her. It really didn't make much of a difference to me, it more just... Set the stage for my childhood.

"It was a strange childhood, I'm sure. I didn't know, since I didn't know anyone else my age until years later. It just never occurred to me... My father's name is Kyrvan Bladedancer, but people usually call him the Bladedancer or the Master. The Bladedancer Empire is large and has a lot of different branches, but the Master is at the top of it all. Almost no one actually sees him; the only people who do are the elite—the Squad—and a handful of whores. But he knows everything that goes on, he has informers like you couldn't even imagine.

"Now the Squad... They're the best trained members of the Empire. They're the assassins and the enforcers; if you cross the Master, you'll find a Squad member on your doorstep to take it out of your hide. No one crosses the Master, no one. And they were the people who raised me. I grew up with a blade in my hand, quite literally. By the time I was, say, ten or so I knew my stuff pretty well, I could almost have been in the Academy." He smirked. "Dad made me wait until I was thirteen for that. "

"What?" Arant asked.

"At thirteen I could pass for fifteen, but at ten—"

"You went to Ledian's Academy? Ledian's elite Academy for men of the blood and future soldiers?"

"Yeah."

"How?"

"Fake name, fake parents, fake credentials. The Bladedancers actually own a good amount of land through a handful of countries, so it wasn't too hard. And Gods know I was... Mature... For my age; I was the one in my year who knew how to sneak into brothels underage. And I was good with a sword, damn good; the instructors loved me. The teachers less so, as I got bored in class a lot and... Well...

"My friend Mykan and I probably spent more time in the Dean's office than everyone else put together. Mykan was my first real friend my age. Or rather, two years older than I was, but that was all right. And like me, he was using a fake name; I was know as Derik Talleras for those four years, and Mykan Kilirik... Well, you might have heard the name tossed around before, although it is fake. Mykan was from an influential family, he was destined to be more than a little involved with Ledian's forces himself, and his parents didn't want anyone to make things easier on him in the Academy because of it. So they took great pains to protect his anonymity."

"Who was he?" Arant asked.

"Mythan Albarin." Daevan said it offhandedly, as though it wasn't something important, but Mythan was one of the most important men in the world. His family was one of the more influential families in Ledian, enough so that when Emperor Bran Raden XIV gave birth to a daughter, not a son as hoped, she was betrothed at birth to the then-toddler Mythan. He'd gone through the Academy, and years later was a General in Ledian's army—or that was his official title. In reality, he was the man in charge of Ledian's security, and while he worked with the army, he rarely lead them in to battle; most of his concern dealt with spies, traitors, and making sure that any threats to his fiancee—wife, now—were dealt with thoroughly.

And everyone knew that the Bladedancer's underworld empire had long been a thorn in the side of the actual Ledian Empire, and that Mythan Albarin had sworn to eradicate the Bladedancers from Temira entirely.

"Oh," was all Arant could manage.

"We hit it off right away. It was an odd situation for both of us to begin with, neither using our real names—not that we knew that at the time—and both trying to hide a few skills to appear more normal. We were quite a team, and for those four years we were inseparable. I was disappointed to find out who he was, that we wouldn't be allowed to stay in touch after graduation, but Dad had better ideas. He thought it would be nice to have an in in Ledian, someone to go to, or blackmail, or at least kill.

"So we kept in touch. It was quite a while before he found out who I was, but we traded letters for the next few years. Sometimes I'd stop in for a drink on my way through; the Talleras family we'd created for me were merchants, and although 'Derik,' had grown up on a farm, he was now part of the family business.

"I guess that was probably the least eventful part of my life. I finished at the Academy, near the top of my class, despite all the headaches 'Mykan,' and I gave the Dean... I'm sure he was glad to see us go. But we had just been having fun, nothing malicious. I wasn't dumb enough to mess up my cover, not at that point."

"What could you have done?" Arant asked. "You were just a kid then."

"I was a kid raised by the Squad. I had done plenty." He shrugged. "Break ins, mostly, and the odd assassination, when Dad wanted to see how I was doing. But after I finished at the Academy... Then my training really began. Dad had Kain, his right hand man, start teaching me. Kain was the Squad Leader at the time, and none too fond of me. I was... Seventeen, maybe? Around there. The next year was bloody and humiliating, at least at first, since Kain wasn't exactly the kindest teacher in the world. His job was to make sure I could defend against anything, under any circumstances, and he liked to do it by having Squad members jump me when he thought I wasn't paying attention.

"You get the hell beat out of you a few times, you start to pay attention, you start to get good. Eventually, I was able to handle Kain's goons to his satisfaction, and he began to teach me technique... Stuff all the Squad members learn from the Leader. How much and what style depends on who is in charge, but Kain was pretty much under orders to teach me everything he knew. I think by the time he was done, I was probably nineteen.

"Finally winning duels with him was a great feeling; Bladedancers in general don't take well to defeat and tend to be revenge bent. I was no exception back then, and given the number of beatings I'd taken and the general animosity between myself and Kain—I don't even remember when that started, now, but it grew with time.

"Kain and I hated each other by the time he was done with me. Each time he bested me I was unconscious, and I enjoyed nothing so much as leaving him in a pool of blood." He shrugged. "It's a dirty, vicious way of life, and it's how I grew up. It's what I knew, it's what I did. I wish my past had been different, but I can't change that now, so...

"Well. I was nineteen when it got to the point where Kain and I were an even match. Dad said he'd take over my training at that point, after all, I was Heir Apparent to everything he ran... And if I thought Kain was a harsh master, I had no idea how bad Dad was. His skills are amazing, and to this day I still honestly don't know if I could beat him in a fight. I certainly couldn't when I was a cocky teenager, but I stopped being so cocky rather quickly when he showed me just how much better he really was. After all, I wasn't stupid, and I did want to learn...

"And so I learned. I learned everything I could. Training with Dad took another few years, but those years were more eventful. He decided when I turned twenty-one that he wanted me to take over the Squad. Squad Leader is the closest thing there is to a training ground for the next Bladedancer; I know that back before he got around to having his own father poisoned, Dad lead the Squad for years.

"Taking control of it was challenging. Kain had no desire to give it up, and I think part of the reason he hated me so much was because I upstaged him. He had been Dad's number one, and suddenly there was this arrogant young son of a bitch who could leave him bleeding nine times out of ten, taking away his power." Daevan shrugged. "I wasn't exactly the most pleasant person back then."

"And how has that changed?" Kaiya muttered.

Daevan smirked, but then, smirking was pretty much his natural expression. "You didn't even know me at the height of my arrogance, Kaiya. You met me not too long after, and surely remember how obnoxious I was then. I'm not nearly so bad now, am I?"

She said nothing, but Arant nodded his agreement. He remembered Daevan from years past, too.

"Well. Anyway. Taking over the Squad was hard, and I honestly did want to kill Kain—there's no surer way to get the Squad in line than to depose their leader—but Dad still thought Kain was useful and asked me not to gut him." He rolled his eyes. "Gods only know how much trouble that would have saved us all in the long run, had I."

"Oh?" Arant asked.

"Yeah. Kain was the one Dad sent to Chyronia to assassinate your father. No Kain, probably no assassination—the Squad is good, but getting in to that city requires the best of the best."

"Oh." Arant looked down at the table, his voice suddenly morose. "I see."

"But that wasn't for a few years yet. At that point... I convinced Kain not to stand in my way by dealing with most of the upper ranking Squad members in a fatal way. The rest of them accepted me. I began to recruit new ones...

"My favorite didn't show up for another few years yet, but I'm getting ahead of myself again. Well. At that point I was pretty much the most smug, arrogant, and obnoxious I ever have been; I was the Squad Leader, and no one could best me but my father, and even that gap closed somewhat every day.

"At twenty-four or so, I'd say I was an even match for my father, but we really never fought a deciding battle. Or at least, not then..." He trailed off for a moment, then regained his train of thought. "It was somewhere around there that my father finally found someone who could unlock the secrets of Ahdab for him, and that was when my life began to change.

"Her name was... I have no idea how the hell her actual name was pronounced, but we all called her Mercy. She was..." he trailed off again. "She was the only person I've ever truly loved."