The Black Prince: Part I by P. J. Fox Page B

the clash of steel on steel outside. Still. A din far louder than accounted for by his paltry band—or by the hundred or so defenders that he’d been promised.
    “If I die this day,” he replied, “then I die. I am prepared to meet my God.”
    He swept his sword up. The time for talk was over. “But if this room be the last thing I see, then it be the last thing you see also.”
    A bleak sorrow weighted him down. The bleakest of bleak sorrows, a weight under which he could scarce move. He’d been charged with a task, and he had failed. Through overconfidence or sheer stupidity, he didn’t know. But he’d led his men into certain death, a fact which bothered him far more than his own demise.
    He prepared to die.
    Then Bjorn spoke for the first time. “How?”
    Hart felt the world slow, an eternity stretching between each heartbeat.
    “You know how.” The stranger’s tone was condescending.
    “We’ve been betrayed.” It wasn’t a question. Bjorn’s tone was pitched low, his words laced with hate. He understood, in that moment, as Hart understood, what had happened.
    And now they were here, in this accursed hut, with this man…it all seemed so surreal.
    Almost from the first moment of their arrival in Molag, Hart had felt as though he were dreaming again. Caught in a nightmare from which he could not awake. Now he wondered if he hadn’t died in the passes and been sent to the underworld. Had he been here, facing this man, for ten minutes or ten thousand years?
    “Silverbeard understands, as you should, that resistance is futile.”
    But Hart wanted only for the man to stop stalling, so he could either die at his hands or kill him, and then join his brothers to die outside. He’d prefer to die outside, he thought, in the snow. Under the open expanse of steel gray winter sky. In sight of the mountains, which he so loved.
    “I ask you once more: join us. Spare yourself, and me, this folly.”
    “Fight me like a man.”
    “If you die, you die for nothing.”
    But if he lived, he’d live as a traitor. Hart could imagine no worse fate. Letting loose a cry, half of defiance and half of despair, he charged.
    Freed of the snow, Hart’s footwork was sure and nimble. Far more lightly than his frame suggested, he pirouetted as he engaged the man. One foot behind the other, for balance, and to spring right as the opposing blade came scything down. Right, left, back, he danced the dance of death with this stranger. His own blade glinted in the low light as it moved, darting in and out with lightning quick movements like the viper for which he was named.
    Capable of striking a distance equal to that of its length, the black death, as it was most commonly known, gave a picture of being lazy. It basked in the sun, warming itself, or slept curled up in an unassuming little ball. The snake was rarely more than three spans long, and near as slim as a garden snake. For which it was often mistaken, by fools.
    The only mortal snake in the mountains, its bite caused death. Or, in the luckier cases, the mere loss of a limb. The snake’s venom, as Hart had learned from Callas, brought acute pain. Which was severe enough on its own that sufferers had been known to beg for death but was nothing in comparison to its later effect. Within hours, the flesh around the bite began to swell and discolor, turning the black of grave dirt. Until the flesh itself, before the next sunrise, became that of a corpse. A dead arm attached to a living man. And if the arm wasn’t removed, the pestilence would spread.
    This was the name that Hart had earned: for the speed and precision of his sword, for his single-minded focus on his enemies. The black death was said to track its intended prey for leagues and leagues, waiting for the lesser creature to tire. Hart the forsaken. Hart the torturer. Hart the man alone.
    Bjorn came at their opponent from behind, screaming a torrent of blind and hopeless rage.
    The man was good. Very good. Hart was