Divide and Conquer
Twenty-Seventh Day of the Eighth Month 293 AC
At the moment, Beren was not acting as Lord Dynymion. He was not the Keyholder who had shirked and shriven before his father, a man who he still looked over his shoulder for whenever someone thought to address him as such, who at the last had just barely forgiven him on his death bed for time spent on the frivolities of the Dancing Blade. Though he had since shed the dark cloak of Braavosi aristocracy, as well as the peacock assortment of garish colors of the young bravo, he was at heart a questing man who thirsted for justice the world had long denied.
The bright red cloak hanging about his shoulders seemed to strike a fine compromise between the two, when married to the soot-blackened plate that a water dancer wouldn't dare be caught in. A Dragon's Talon, however, need their scales as much as their claws...
And the massive blade he used to cleave in twain the 'bandit' rebel before him, was as fine a claw as any. They fell messily onto the shattered rain-slicked cobbles, war-cry a ragged gasp through pale lips.
The fighting jerked to a sudden stand still, grim soldiers gathered together in a deluge of falling rain, mud and blood coating their armor and blades while the distant shouts of sergeants from the Shields a fair distance away indicated that their headlong charge into the rebel invested town had not gone unnoticed. That his men had followed him out of sheer surprise as much as loyalty...
Enough, Beren had spat,
I'll do it myself!
The Captain could not deny the results. It had at least lit a fire under their asses, he thought, though he would concede only the fact that he had been given leave to 'commit where you think the hammer blow best placed' made the move merely bold, rather than outright insubordinate. It also spoke highly of the Legion's light horse and their ability to deter flanking action against the Dragon's Talons by not-quite incompetent enemy cavalry.
The sellsword leader dismounted, sizing Beren up, having the gait of a predator which he knew well by experience.
So this is that Fey-touched black-heart, he thought. They had been played for fools by him for the last two weeks in this short campaign alone, and now he was cornered.
Whatever side of the sheets a man was born on, they all bleed the same... some more prettily than others.
By unspoken agreement both sides cleared ground at but a glance from the two. Pure theater, but this wasn't a mere
slaver, or anything so pedestrian as a simple mercenary, he was some kind of by the roots revolutionary who brayed that the Marches should secede, owing their rebellion as proof of the affront and 'cowardice and abject prostration' of the more soft-palmed magisters standing on the council. Beren considered it more shrewd than anything else.
No one wants to be reduced to fine ashes by dragon's fire.
They did not speak, for all that, and had the man been anyone else Beren likely would have ordered a charge then and there and simply cut them down like dogs... but this one was clever. Cut him down neat and quick and they'd make a martyr out of him, worse still he had freedmen's courage at his back, the opportunistic and those angered at the idea they would be 'granted freedom' by the masters they had dreamed of stringing up like the Legion had been stringing
them up, along with those who took issue with the King's rather secular policies...
Nothing quite like a holy war to turn a glorified police action into a right mess.
Instead they circled one another, Beren's massive weapon hanging loose near the ground as the iron corded muscle of his arms ached in protest and anticipation. The rebel captain moved counter-clockwise, his own greatsword resting on his shoulder, sharp eyed behind a silvered helm, walking with great loping strides.
All at once the two drew closer as they changed directions, rainfall coming down harder on the wrecked market plaza the fighting had been drawn into.
Steel clashed against steel as the man gripped the blade of his weapon and attempted to drive the guard into Beren's eye, the Braavosi ducking back and smashing his sword against their guard a moment later, the enemy's weapon cutting the air before his helm's visor. Steel crashed against steel and sparks flew, the two not able to gain the better of the other.
They traded a dozen strikes in silence as the weather took a turn for the worse. A heartbeat, a minute, an hour... an eternity had passed, gouges and scratches accumulating in the witch-steel that garbed them.
"From where dost thou hail?" The rebel inquired casually during their next lock of blades, excitement and interest dancing in his eyes, speaking in a faintly archaic manner in High Valyrian, only the faintest trace of an accent to his conversational words.
"Braavos upon the Lagoon," Beren replied as the two separated, neither yet to gain the other man's measure.
"Opportunists everywhere," the man said with a faintly sardonic smile, perhaps acknowledging the irony of his own part in the hellishly stupid seditious activity, some of the magisters who's long-standing dominion over these undeveloped lands was growing more tenuous even while leeches like this one thought to ride the wave of short-lived chaos to their advantage.
"Seems to me you have missed yours," Beren sniffed, "With a blade like that, you likely could have won your slice of clay in the a fortnight if you had backed the right horse, or dragon as the case may be." His voice gained a tinge of a mocking sadness to it, "Only to end dangling from a noose."
"That would be a boring ending to an otherwise exciting tale," the man smiled as they traded strikes, Beren's armor groaning in protest as one such strike nearly carved into his ribs if he had not blunted the force of the blow. He punched the man in the side of the head with a steel-clad fist, nursing his bruising chest.
It had all lead to this moment. A dozen strikes, leaning hard with each blow that two blades of steel kissing each other like lovers caught in an embrace, making keening and brutal music in a complex dance, neither man unsteady on their feet despite their heavy equipment they wore and broken cobbles or sluicing mud they were forced to carefully step around. For all of those dozen, neither man letting up or allowing the exertions of the day or the smell of the dead and dying break their narrow focus, spinning, lashing, ducking and jabbing from riposte to parry, an accord formed by two artists with neither knowing the steps in advance.
Except one blade was of quite ordinary provenance, and the other had been hardened like seasoned wood in Sorcerer's Deep to be near unbreakable. One blade gave...
broke.
The man stared at his shattered sword, then was knocked on his ass by the hard blow to the head Beren delivered unceremoniously with the flat of his weapon.
Can't be missing that trial, Beren thought in satisfaction,
now can we?
Even though he was tempted to slay him where he stood, for his own reputation could only be helped by the breaking of the enemy's morale... the more level-headed part of him, that which was demanded by his father before they had reconciled before his passing, and honed more carefully while acting almost like a student to the Sealord, won out in the end.
He stared at the remnant of the enemy's tattered band, lifting his blade in their direction. Half threw down their arms on the spot, and the other half were sent into a rout.
"Perhaps my acting could use some work?"
Not all men could be mummers, he conceded,
King Viserys aside.
Lines of grim soldiers with cold smiles marched past him to secure the settlement. They would not catch all of them... but they didn't need to.
A noose today, or a noose tomorrow, what else could be predicted of those who would raise arms against the Dragon Banner?
"Captain," his adjutant presented themselves before him as the prisoner was taken into custody. "The General reports success by raven. He wants us moving out in another hour."
"Oh, he's back then?" Beren asked in surprise and amusement. "Did he win many favors in the King's pony show?
"Many ladies were left disappointed," the lieutenant replied with a straight face and not even a twitch of a smile. "Had he won I am sure her Highness, Princess Daenerys, would have brayed loudest about his vaunted honor and bravery."
"I suppose the madmen are brave enough at that, being so willing to trust their lives to horses and swinging their giant sticks at each other for fun," he told his subordinate irreverently.
Neither mentioned the massive sword Beren had slung over his shoulder.
A gentleman's agreement, then.