“Bully,” Theodore smirked, beads of sweat standing out on his brow. “That poor, poor kid.”

“Trust me, the vile little prig deserves worse, what with the stuff he said about me. Even a kid like him should have known better.” I took off the fencing mask, quickly moving to wipe my sopping forehead with my left arm...

Bam. Ow.

I remembered too late that I was still holding my tonfa in that hand, a tough wooden baton that looked like the letter ‘t’ cut in half. I hate forgetting things like that, not just because it makes me look absent-minded, but also because ... well, it hurts.

Theo was right there, laughing at me as I began to rub my tender forehead.

“You amaze me sometimes, Vincent. Here we were in the safest room in your keep, wrapped up in practice gear, but I guess that you're just such a sneaky, vicious bastard that you actually waited until your mask was off before mounting a surprise offensive against your forehead. You're your own worst enemy sometimes, I swear.”

“Oh shush,” I chuckled. “I was simply distracted by my own superb storytelling, bringing you up to speed on all that you had missed. By the way, what happened to you last night? I thought you said you'd already received an invite.”

“Ah, yes. Something came up, I'm afraid. It was probably for the best, all things considered ... I don't think I would have had an easy time maintaining an angry scowl, based on your description of the evening.”

“True. Still, this 'something' that came up wouldn't have been a woman, perchance? A dalliance that went on for a little longer than you expected?”

“Vincent,” said Theo with the barest trace of indignation, “not everything that holds sway over my day to day activities must possess cleavage, you know. I have a large keep – one over three times the size of your own – and my own territorial dealings to handle. I'm a busy, busy man!”

“Very well, I apologize for assuming it was a girl,” I said contritely. “What was her name?”

“Wynnifer,” he sighed, ghost of a smile on his face. “Ah, but you should have seen her. Gorgeous length of red hair, eyes so green I thought I was swimming in the ocean. Ah, me. You really should come out in disguise with me one of these nights, wigs and all that. Sometimes it's nice to just let loose and pretend to be someone else, forget your troubles for a while.”

“Pass,” I said, tossing down the remainder of my shoulder gear and beginning to unbuckle the chest-piece I was sweating uncomfortably in. “I'm sure it's fun, all that, but I'll leave it to you and your knights. No doubt someone would recognize me out with the Haundsing boys, neh?” I pointed at the bridge of my nose to emphasize the point.

“Bah! We'll dress you up in a knight's outfit, tell everyone you got those scars from being hit in the face by a torch-wielding brigand who was trying to run off with a baby, whom you saved heroically. The ladies will fawn over you for hours with a story like that, even if ... yeah, yeah,” he said, noticing my look. “You're too busy with other stuff, and I keep forgetting that you have this unexplainable aversion to fun.”

“We going to go down this vole-tunnel again? We've talked about it before.”

“Vince, there's no good reason why you can't have a relationship with someone, or connect with someone in a way that doesn't involve you being a Lord, or they your tenant. I mean, gods, man! Do you have any company aside from me who comes to the keep? Someone not here on business? Anyone at all?”

“It's not quite that simple. I can't just go and-”

“And I'll be taking that as a 'No'. You work yourself to the bone, trying to do everything yourself. You never have any fun, Vince! You have to learn to let go a bit, delegate. How many people besides me can you say you even trust?”

I opened my mouth as I thought of Cyrus, and then closed it again when I recalled how his shoulders had slumped after dropping off the floor plans, the momentary look of hurt outside of my bedchamber as he realized I hadn't shared the fact that I'd been counting on being robbed that night.

“I’ll tell you this much,” he continued, “if we didn’t know each other – if our property bordered each others and the only thing I knew about you was what I’d heard, you’d have me twitchier than a candlemaker with insomnia.”

“You can't be serious! I'm not like that at all, and you of all people should-”

“I know better, Vincent, but they,” he gestured sharply with his hand towards the door, “don't know any of that, do they? You're like this maniac when it comes to artful thefts and intrigue, and that's all anybody ever gets to see. None of them see you cut loose, or relax ... and that makes them nervous! Hades, it even makes me nervous, watching you work as hard as you do, and I'm able to come and talk to you about it! Nobody really knows what kind of a guy you are, aside from me, and even that we have to keep a secret!

“So what ... I should take up falconing? Visit the bordello? Get roaring drunk in public and wake up in the middle of a street with my trousers down and my face painted green?”

“Nothing like that, but you’ve got to find balance. Ease up and relax a little every now and then. I mean, just look at you – even this conversation is making you tense, isn’t it?”

“No,” I said, trying to relax my shoulders without him noticing.

“Liar. You’ve got to allow for some fun in your life ... some living! Did your father shut himself in his keep, or did he take the odd moment or two to actually enjoy being a Lord?”

I frowned. He had a point.

“Okay, okay ... you can stop badgering me. Next opportunity that comes up where we can don a disguise and go forth into the street, I promise that I’ll accompany you-”

“Tonight! Wynnifer has this adorable friend, a tiny little blond thing with the cutest little cleft chin, who-”

“...just as soon as the duel is over and done with.”

“Oh, right. Well,” he sighed and gave me a sly sideways look, “I suppose I could hold off on seeing her for a couple of days, give her a chance to get her breath back. You know what they say, 'Absence in the heart makes growing...' uh, something, something.”

“Theo, your fondness for well tooled phrases tugs at my heart like a ... something-or-other.”

“Couldn't have said it better,” he chuckled, reaching for his foil. “You want me to use something other than rapier and tonfa this time?”

I was very thankful to have Theo as a friend, and not just because of his insightful, plain-talking nature either. The Haundsing family came from a long line of professional duelists successful enough to outright buy a Lordship and arrange for property to govern, rather than inheriting it or aspiring to the possession of it through cunning and thievery.

As could be expected, Theo's grounding in weapons and swordplay far exceeded my own. There are very few Lords, or even duelists, who can claim proficiency at anything more than a simple saber-dagger or saber-tonfa combination. Theo seems to know all variations of sword, with either hand, from fighting with a single longsword all the way to unlikely combinations like dirk and scythe, or even two tonfa.

To put it in perspective; I am smugly told that now, at the age of thirty, I'm approximately the same level fencer that he was at the age of eighteen. (Sometimes when he's sounding particularly smug about it, I'll challenge him to a game of cards to smarten him up)

However smug he may sound, it does not shame me to admit he's much better than me. I've seen Theo fight in serious duels, and I'll be one of the first to clearly state that I don't understand half of what he's doing at times. Most duelists seem to regard him with awe, and even those few who don't outright worship him are wary of him, and give him a wide berth and noticeable respect.

Not a bad guy to have as your teacher, really.

“No, rapier and tonfa will be fine.” I waved a hand at the dueling circle etched into the floor in front of us. “Shall we continue?”

“Bah, it wasn't me who needed a breather in the first place!”

“Well, I could have sworn you needed a break there near the end, what with you hanging your guard so low that your sword was practically scraping the floor,” I said in a friendly, mocking tone.

He smiled a special Theo smile. “Want to see what would happen if you tried to get through that?”

“Sure ... your funeral. I was trying to be nice and pretend it wasn't there,” I shrugged, standing up from the bench and re-applying my protective fencing gear before putting my mask back on.

“You ready?” he asked, opting to put on his mask for this round. Usually he went without when we were fencing, probably just to give me the heebie-jeebies.

“I'm more ready than you, apparently. Up, up!” I said, parodying his own habit of getting me to raise the point of my sword higher if I were letting it drop.

“Indeed. My guard is far, far too low ... I look like a rank amateur. Am I?”

“Uh, no. An emphatic 'no' even...”

“Well then, you see this ... what's your move? How would you take advantage?” he asked.

“Straight lunge through the center, left arm at shoulder height to parry if you attempted to sweep at me as I did so.”

“Very good, solid approach. Go ahead.”

I did so. I steadied myself for a lunge, and ... well, how can I describe it? There was the hiss-sliding of metal, a feeling of panic, the realization that I was taking an additional step forward when I should be stepping back, and then the sound of me hitting the floor with a 'whump'.

When I looked up, Theo was standing on my sword, which was pinned with the flat against the floor, and I was nowhere near it ... lying on my side about three feet away from him.

He looked smug. Very smug.

“Don't make me challenge you to a game of cards,” I muttered feebly.

His brow furrowed. “Pardon?”

“Never mind. Okay, so that was fun. What exactly happened?” I asked, pulling myself up with the help of the hand he offered me.

“You're getting good enough that you're entering one of the more interesting stages of swordsmanship, where the rules become complex and change ever so slightly. Your defense is near perfect, you maintain your guard well, and you think in terms of how you might leave yourself open to attack even as you yourself attack. So now, when I give you an opening,” he said, performing a guard stance and positioning his sword too low, as he had before, “I expect you to take it, and I'm prepared for it. Knowing that you'll be lunging, I begin to block a lunge the instant I see you move, which results in a slightly heavier upwards parry because my sword started so low.” He motioned as if performing the act of deflecting my lunge. “Once overextended, even though you weren't off-balance you found that your arm had been diverted upwards, and your instinct was to recover guard position as quickly as possible. Your sword being so high,” he took his tonfa and brought it over his head, where my imaginary sword would have been, “all I had to do was help your sword on the way down so that the blade would hit the ground, and once there, step, step, swing to push you over...”

He moved with exaggerated slowness so that I could see every detail of what he had done much, much faster when he'd disarmed me. It looked pretty slick.

“Well, so I guess I've learned something today,” I said, picking up my practice foil, “And that would be 'Never believe for a second that Theo is getting sloppy or tired.' A question though – Why is it that I don't see people doing things like that more often in duels?”

“Ah, but if you know the person you're fighting is good, you see right through that trick. So, you keep a perfect guard up at all times so that when he sees you with a lower guard and thinks you don't mean to do it, he'll jump at the chance, which you've prepared for ... but if they know that you've prepared for it and they only let you think that they're going to take ... errr, you know what? First things first. Like I said, the strategy gets pretty complex, and you're in the very beginning stages of learning it.”

“So, because I didn't know that you were 'bluffing', what you did more or less was open yourself up to a certain type of attack, because you knew that that's how I would have taken advantage of it?” I asked.

Something about how that sounded bothered me.

“Exactly. Now, one of the reasons it's so tricky at this stage is because you might be fighting people who are legitimately worse than you, and you'll begin to wonder if the opportunities you see are ... hey, are you okay? You hurt something on the way down?”

“No, I...” I said, taking my mask off once more, lost in thought. “Theo, this duel with Teuring, what do you make of it?”

“Well, from all accounts he lacks the funds to even pay a tenth of what a duelist would ask for the prospect of fighting you, in turn meaning that he shall have to fight it himself. I suppose this means that all of us in attendance will be made to laugh, occasionally saying something like 'that poor, poor bastard' to one another as you run him around the circle a few times and leave him utterly exhausted, even if you lack the sadistic temperament to actually make him bleed in unfortunate places. Likely you'll only need to seriously wound him if he goes berserk on you and just starts flailing away with his sword. Inferior swordsmen can sometimes get through even the best defensive guard if they're lucky enough, or simply erratic enough.”

“Yes, but...” I fought to put my uncertainty into words. “What if he's actually good? Being humbled in a duel against a young lout like him, that would be just as damaging to my reputation as being stolen from, would it not? We knew little enough about him yesterday, even after I went to his keep to spring my surprise on him. I don't recall seeing anything on the information I got from Cyrus regarding swordsmanship.”

“Then he likely has none,” Theo shrugged.

“Yes, but I can't know that, can I?”

“My friend, the two of us have been practicing our fencing together every week since we were both sixteen years old. As Lords go, I don't think there's a single one who doesn't come from a line of professional duelists that would give you trouble, and in truth you could probably take at least half of the so-called 'duelists' among the well-trained Lords I've been introduced to. I'll even go so far as to give your ego a boost and claim that you're downright dangerous. You know, except against me,” Theo smiled. “Then you're weak and timid, like a little boy whom I scoff at. 'Ha!' I'd say, scoffingly, and-”

“Yes, yes, we can play some low-stakes Lords and Deuces later, and I'll take your money one copper at a time until your humility returns. I'm not even certain that 'scoffingly' is a real word. However, I'm very serious, Theo. You've told me that I'm about as good as you were when you were eighteen or so, and he's at least twenty-three. I know next to nothing about this kid. What if he's better than me?”

“Vince, relax,” he said, obviously meaning it. “You got like this the last time you had a duel, remember? Even if Teuring hired a trainer as a teenager and practiced every other day ... you'd still have next to nothing to worry about. You're actually fencing around the level where I was when I was dueling professionals. And winning, if you'll recall. This kid is a Lord, remember ... one who barely has enough native talent and smarts to manage his own affairs correctly, and who was stupid enough to want to make his first move against you of all people. He certainly doesn't sound rich enough to be able to afford proper sword training, or smart enough to feel he needs it.”

“No, no I suppose not. No point in borrowing worries, which I suspect is half of my problem. Say, you know what might be interesting?”

“Do tell.”

“Well,” I said, “he may have gone down to the Circles today in order to solicit the services of a duelist, or has become worried enough about the possibility of having to represent himself that he wanted to flash some steel down there. I think I'll make an afternoon of it, drop by and say hello to some of the boys, maybe have a drink or two. Getting some information on what this kid's been doing or who he's been talking to might be enough to calm my nerves somewhat.”

“You know what also might calm your nerves?”

“What?”

“Another lunge, or three,” he said with an eager grin, putting his mask back on. “C'mon Vince! I've been waiting years for you to get good enough to use this move against you. You gotta let me have at least a couple more...”

“Bully,” I laughed, quickly putting my mask back on. “You just watch my fingers ... and if any floorboards knock the teeth out of my head, you'll be the one picking them up.”

“Sounds fair to me,” he chuckled, assuming the same guard position I'd seen minutes before.

I tried getting past Theo's guard five more times. The results? Well, let's just say that I expected to see a few unlikely bruises on my hip the next morning, and that I was very much looking forward to the next time Theo and I found ourselves at a card table.