“Whoa… whoa!” Henric said, shuffling backwards as best he could given his bonds. “I ain’t one of them demons, I swear!”
“Exactly what a Rakshasa would say,” Kersath replied calmly. He continued to advance on the former guard turned prisoner and quickly step-danced around Kre when the boy tried to get in his way. It was almost beautiful how gracefully and effortlessly he could move around obstacles when he had a mind to.
Virryn’s gasp jolted Kre back to action but while Kersath’s move was pure elegance, Kre’s attempt to stumble back in an effort to stop what he believed would be a clear execution was purely comical. To everyone watching, it seemed as if the poor boy had two, possibly three left feet as he nearly fell when he twisted around. “Wait, Kersa…”
But it was too late. The dark Ylveryan’s blade snickered out faster than Kre could blink and Henric stumbled back until he fell on his backside.
It took a second, but a thin trail of blood appeared on the man’s cheek. The cut wasn’t deep enough for the blood to trickle down, so it just welled up there like an angry crimson mark on a school paper.
“Red,” Gnore murmured in his matter-of-fact way. Kersath nodded and flicked his blade back into the scabbard.
“What?” The question seemed to come from all three of the clueless, though Kre’s voice had been the loudest. He darted forward and helped Henric to his feet, looking the man over to see if there hadn’t been any other wounds that neither of them had noticed at first.
Gnore held out a small piece of linen that he had cut from the pile Virryn had been carrying prior. He waved it at Kre when the boy made no move to take it at first. “Rakshasa blood… is a strange dark greyish color,” he said calmly, carefully enunciating every word to ensure there was nothing lost in his Dweorvkin dialect. “Reeks o’moldy onion too,” he added, this time not worrying over his accent.
“You could have warned me,” Henric muttered, letting Virryn press the makeshift bandage against his cheek. “Even if the cut wasn’t meant to be lethal, the shock of it could have been!”
“The blood was only one part. The other part of the test was his reaction,” Kersath explained using his exasperated tone, as if he were trying to explain something simple to a toddler. Kre also noticed that Kersath chose not to address Henric directly, as if the man were beneath him.
As much as Kre respected the dark Ylveryan… these were the times he wanted to punch him.
“Back to it then?” Gnore asked. Without waiting for a response from the others, he turned to Virryn and gave a formal bow. “Lovely lass, would’ja be as kind as a peach an’ show the way?”
Kersath snorted, earning him a dark look from Virryn, who thought he was laughing at her being called lovely. “Brother Gnore, men of the faith should not flirt with married Ylveryan women.”
Gnore chuckled and gave a sly wink to Virryn. Her mood improved greatly then and Kre even saw a smile start to emerge from the corner of her lips. “If we are ready then,” she called out, collecting herself and dusting off her clothes, “let us go make some chaos.”
“If this group can’t do it,” Henric muttered following along close behind Gnore but visibly giving Kersath a wide berth, “ain’t no one can.”