I stood there a second puffing and staring until I heard a groan and a clump and saw Lanny tripping backward over his own feet, his sword flying over his head, and Gordon above him bracing his back foot for a quick thrust, and somehow I was right there behind him and slamming the hilt of my sword against the back of his neck, only I missed this time, too, and there was a truly awful crunch as the pommel bashed a hole in the skull and he died before he could fall.

Then he did fall, and I stood there, knees wobbly, until I sat down with a sudden plop and looked at the sight of that mashed gray and bloody head.

“Lanny! Lanny, I think I killed him!” I wailed, and the tears were already coming to my eyes.

Lanny was a lot cooler. Always had been. He was already back on his feet and retrieving his sword before he said: “Don’t worry. He would’ve died anyway.” Lanny shoved the body over with his foot, and 1 saw the blood. Lanny had been doing pretty well after all. The man’s thigh was cut almost to the bone. What do you call that artery? The femoral?

1 got pretty sick. After that I stayed crouched there beside the road on my hands and knees while Lanny made purposeful movements around me. I wanted to help, knew I should, but just couldn’t stand to look at them right then, particularly after seeing that my guy was a lot more than knocked out. Seems I’d driven the nose straight back into his head.

Shit.

I stayed out of it until I felt Lanny pressing a cloth against my bloody cheek and putting my hand up to hold it there. It stung from the wine he’d soaked it with. But that made sense. Alcohol to kill the germs, like in the movies. And fortunately, the resulting infection wasn’t serious.

I didn’t really have it together until a few minutes later when we were already astride the horses, and moving down the road. Lanny’s voice was sort of a dull irritation at first until I started paying attention to the individual words and realized he was trying to bring me out of the shock by reminding me of the point of the whole deal.

Such as: We had wanted to be here. We had wanted to kick ass. We had.

Plus: They had started it.

After a while it started to work, bless him. He got me calmed down and then coherent, and then even I started to look back with satisfaction on what I’d done. Only then, when I realized I’d broken every fencing rule I’d ever known and still gotten away with it, did I get really scared the way I should have been all along.

I had to stop my horse and get sick again. Lanny sneered and looked disgusted, but an 'hour later he had to do the same thing.

But that seemed to work it out of us, damn our silly hides. That seemed to settle us down. A couple of hours later, I’ll be damned if we weren’t grinning and cocky again. Incredible.

“Wait a minute!” Lanny said suddenly, and pulled his horse up short.

“What?”

“We were set up! Smada set us up.”

My reply showed how it had been done. “Huh?” I muttered.

“And we fell for it! Dammit! We were so busy trying to impress him we didn’t even see what he was doing. He wasn’t hiring us. He was using us to slow down whoever those guys were that were chasing him. Don’t you see? He was running away from them. And he suckered us into buying him some extra time.” He stared at me, his face furious with anger. “You get it, Felix?”

I did. Too late. Way too late. But 1 got it. Finally.

“Hey!” I burst out. “We’ve got to get off this road. If there are any more and they find those bodies in the ditch ...”

Lanny was way ahead of me again. “Not only that, there’s Smada.”

“Whaddya mean?”

“He said he’d meet us down this road. I guarantee you that means he’s on another one. We gotta go cross-country until we find him.”

“Okay. Which way?”

“Guess.”

And I did, and once more dumb luck (or, thinking back on it, maybe something else) worked. We not only found the other road, we came across it at the inn with Smada’s horse corralled outside.

Along the way an odd thing happened. I asked Lanny if he was sure we wanted to find Smada. He looked at me fumty and said of course we did and I let it go. Because it was true. I really did want to find Smada. Supposedly to teach him a lesson for messing with us. But in my heart I knew better, and so did Lanny, though neither of us admitted it.

We wanted to find Smada. But not to fight him. We wanted to find him to brag about what we’d done.

See what I mean? We were slow learners.

The fight started when, somewhere knee-deep into the party, I turned to the innkeeper and asked to use his phone. Don’t know what possessed me to do that. The thing is, there was this dude standing at the bar between Lanny and me when I said this, a real jerk this guy, and . . . well, as soon as the words were out of my mouth I realized how silly it was, being where we were and all, and Lanny did too, and we looked at each other and started laughing. And this obnoxious dude, who had been spoiling for a fight all night long, thought we were laughing at him, and the next thing 1 knew I was fighting again.

Which was okay with me. The guy had pissed me off long ago when he’d been messing with Smada, and even though I was just stumbling into it more or less unexpectedly, it was all right, it was okay, I was ready.

Thinking back, we stumbled into the whole mess. And then stumbled from one step to the next. Like the inn, itself.

Thinking back, we didn’t enter that inn at all. We dove into it headfirst. Dove into it like it was the ultimate hot tub, steamy smoky air and spilling wine and healthy fun-smelly wenches and roaring fires and roaring laughter and loud music and barking dogs and gritty cool stone floors ideally positioned to catch you when you fell over with a mug to your lips.

It was a wonderful place. Truly. Exactly as I’d always imagined such a place to be. I mean exactly. Which shoulda made me wonder, only I was too busy having fun to think to be scared.

We didn’t have any trouble with Smada. We stomped in to confront him, and there he was, pillowed in a corner like a sultan with wenches framed all about him and servant types fetching and carrying. And the first thing anybody said was me saying: “What happened to you?” Because lying there like that instead of astride that huge mount of his he looked so, I dunno, w«formidabie.

Underrating Smada was, without doubt, one of the major mistakes we made. Bad as it was, though, we managed to compound it later on.

The argument we had stated our intentions of having never got very far. For one thing, our hearts weren’t much in it, and for another . . . well, he looked so goddam jolly there on those pillows filling his hands with whores and his belly with wine. We didn’t want to fight him. We wanted to join him.

We did.

Smada, reading us like a book as always, laughingly pointed out that it was we who had begun by trying to con him, which was true. And it was we who had begun the day without a cent but had ended it safe, healthy, blooded, rich (from the coins Lanny had taken from the bodies) and mounted. So what had we to complain about?

Put that way, nothing. We laughed and looked a bit sheep-faced, I guess, and then we joined right in. It was wonderful. There were all kinds of folks there. It was one of the biggest inns in the territory and situated well along the major trade routes. There were merchants with their entourages and young swordsman types like Lanny and me and old swordsman types like Smada. One of them, the general, a big old tough dude with a full beard and scars, turned out to know somebody who knew somebody who was a cousin of somebody Smada knew well before she died, and on the basis of that intimacy the two decided to combine parties at once, and within an hour the old general and his bunch, along with Smada trailing us, had all but taken over the place.