Prodigal 6: Fencing with Fog
<- 5: Toumb of Lost Souls ~0~ 7: A Silver Sheild ->
The fog cleared out rapidly, though there was still very little wind, though we had to walk through a really dense patch of it as we headed back towards the house, and I ended up wiping damp strands of hair out of my face every few seconds. It was a little like walking through a spiderweb. Leah, predictably, didn’t much care what she looked like, and ran on ahead, though never very far. I simply walked along, soaking it all in as we took detour after detour, and let her show me her world.
Our pleasant walk was interrupted more or less the minute that we got back within sight of the house.
“Leah!”
Both of us looked up: Rhian was balancing on the top of a wall, looking very pleased with herself, wearing sweats and carrying… a sword? It was like a skinny piece of wire, and it took me a moment to realize that it was a fencing sword. Somehow I’d expected it to come from the approximate era of the other pieces of the house.
“Up for a match?” she called down to us.
“I’m giving Ellie the tour,” Leah shouted back up.
“I don’t mind,” I said immediately, “you should spend some time with your sisters too.” Besides, I was curious, though I didn’t say so.
“Afraid you’ve gotten rusty in the last four years?” Rhian asked, and I could hear the smirk in her voice. And I knew that, ultimately, Leah would rise to the bait. But she looked at me first, as if to check that I was okay with it. I nodded.
“You wish!” she yelled back up at her sister, and with that, we were off. Leah ran back upstairs to get changed, while Rhian mysteriously summoned their father and hauled a protesting Tess, laptop cradled in her arms, out to a flat piece of turf in the garden and started marking out a long, narrow strip in some sort of white chalk. I settled in to watch, though my choices were sitting on a bench next to Tess, who was already ticking away on her laptop and giving every appearance of paying no attention - a pity, since it looked from where I was like she was going to have the best seat - and planting myself on a comfortable patch of sod.
I compromised by finding myself a patch of grass near the bench. Tess looked up at me and then immediately back down at her computer. That was too bad, because I did not intend to move, for her or anyone. She was just going to have to deal with my choice of seating arrangements.
The match began. Granted, I knew very little about fencing, but even I could see that Leah and her sister made a good pair. They were awfully close to the same height, and when they started up they were almost the same speed. And wearing their fencing masks, someone who didn’t know them well might not have been able to tell them apart, since both of them had black hair thrown back in a ponytail and the same determined stance.
“You haven’t practiced at all in the last two years, have you?” Rhian asked as they bowed.
“Doesn’t matter: I’ll beat you every time, practice or not, oh little sister.” Leah was clearly hoping that her sister would rise to the bait, but they both stood there for another moment, clearly considering their options. Finally the match began, with Leah advancing but Rhian not seeming to mind retreating backwards. Especially since Leah always found her sword blocked, and before long had to make a great leap backwards.
To me the match looked like a lot of walking, backwards and forwards, with a lot of cleverly waving swords around, but Tess seemed to know what was going on, because she glanced up occasionally at her sisters.
“Watch her parry, Rhian!” she called out once, before hiding behind her computer screen once more. I could have sworn that Leah made a face at her, but under the masks I wasn’t sure. I supposed it was only fair that Tess was cheering for Rhian, because I was cheering for Leah, if a little more quietly due to never knowing exactly what was good or bad.
Four minutes later I heard the trio’s father, who was judging, call out “Hit!” I wasn’t sure which one had hit which, but both of them backed off quickly.
“Where did you learn that trick?” Leah asked, a trifle enviously I thought.
“Grandmother’s,” Rhian replied serenely, “obviously, it’s a little different with those kinds of swords, but I’ve been practicing.”
They began again. This time Leah did not immediately go after it - she seemed to have underestimated her sister in the first round, and now she was being more cautious.
It still looked like a lot of flailing to me. Really controlled flailing, though.
Leah put on a burst of speed somehow, and her dad called out “Hit!” I was more or less certain that this time she had won, because Rhian made a noise of disgust.
“I cannot believe you got me with that old trick,” she said, and Leah just smugly stepped back into the beginning position.
This is about when I realized that both of them were showing off. Mostly because Tess rolled her eyes and made a very loud comment about it, either not caring who heard or intending for everyone in the area to hear.
“The point is to actually poke the other person,” she said.
“Do my ears deceive me?” Leah asked the world in general, “Our Tessandra made a pun. I’ll start ordering popsicles from hell.”
“The day hell freezes over will be the day that you do something worthwhile,” Tess shouted back from where we were sitting.
“Oooh, metaphor. We are getting fancy,” Leah said, not taking her eyes off of Rhian and their admittedly now very slow swordfight. “Someday you might work your way all the way up to irony and sarcasm.”
“Lay off it, Leah.” That was Rhian, who had pretty much stopped fighting.
“What? Last I heard of it, you fully approved of making the pocket dictionary shut up occasionally. Besides, you were the one who said that she’s too much of a computer to take offense -”
“Enough, Leah.” I had never seen Leah’s father angry, and he was nearly as scary as Leah’s mom. If I were Leah, I’d be long gone. He didn’t even have to raise his voice.
And suddenly even the birds were silent. Leah stared at her father, while Tess stared at Leah, and I tried not to stare at anybody in particular. Their father likewise did not stare at any of them, but he made it clear that he was staring at all of them. He didn’t even look particularily mad, except around the eyes. He meant business, and his daughters knew it.
“All three of you,” he said, quietly, “will cease provoking each other. Now. I don’t know what’s been going on here, and I don’t care, but this will stop.”
I took the long silence as assent. There was no talk as Rhian and Leah began again, but there was no showing off either. Nobody said anything, and I missed the first point because I was watching Leah’s face carefully, as much as I could see of it through the mask, and it seemed to me that her concentration was more or less frazzled. She just wasn’t in it anymore, and it only took a moment for Rhian, with a look of great closed concentration, to score the last point, digging it firmly into her sister’s elbow so that her foil bent up like a thin victory arch. And then it was all over, with Leah quietly rubbing her bruised elbow as the little family gathering disappeared like the fog.