Sarah Zettel - A Young Swordswoman's Garden Primer

VIP免费

2024-12-20 0 0 24.21KB 10 页 5.9玖币

"Do you know who I am?" Allys pulled herself up to her full height. Her flaming, auburn curls brushed the shop's low

ceiling.

The shopkeeper did not look impressed. "You are Allys the Bold, Swordswoman of the Mystic East, daughter of

Ferra, daughter of Ganelle d'Rainier, or so you said. But I am Drethwain, Shopkeeper of the First Order and in the name of

my family honor, I will not sell you a magic item for less than thrice what I paid for it!"

Allys sighed. She could, of course, kill him and take the rusty hauberk in the corner, but she was wearing her

business clothes. When people hired a Genuine Barbarian Swordswoman, Deeply Versed in Secrets-of-the-Mystic-East,

they wanted brass and jewels, jingly gold chains, flowing purple cloaks, gleaming headbands holding back flaming tresses, a

sword that would split an elephant, and daggers tucked into all manner of exotic locales. This town was crowded, and after

her personal business was concluded, she would almost certainly need to find work again. Allys saw no point in letting the

paying customers, or even the potential customers, down.

"This world is all illusion anyway," Chi Xe, her surprisingly young Wise-Old-Master had told her. "Work with it."

The problem was, the outfit was an absolute bitch to try to fight in.

Allys sighed and gave the hauberk on its crooked stand an appraising look. It was almost solid rust. Cobwebs trailed

off its short sleeves.

If that oracle was pulling a fast one, I'm going to drop her into that sacred well head first. She had paid the skinny,

doe-eyed woman for three answers to three questions; Can I regain my ancestral castle? What aid do I need to accomplish

this? Where do I find it? The answers: yes, wear the magic armor of the D'Rainiers, and the northwest corner of Drethwain's

Shoppe of Ancient Mysteries, had led her here to confront this greasy man with definite feelings about his standing in the

world.

She held up her hand. "Far be it from me, Sir, to seek to undo any man's honor." She planted her shiny, black boot

on a creaking chair, and pulled out one of her daggers. With a grunt, she twisted the biggest scarlet "jewel" out of its pommel

and tossed it to Drethwain.

"That is the ruby Tharyx, taken from the dagger that killed the dragon Quaraeth the Most Fell. Whosoever carries it

cannot be deceived by any lie or illusion of man, monster or god."

"Is that true?" Drethwain squinted at the stone.

"As far as you know."

He gave her a gap-toothed smile. "The shirt's yours. As is."

She did manage to get him to wrap it up first. She had no intention of getting rust and cobwebs smeared all over her

glittery work clothes. She slung the bundle across the rump of Grandiere, her huge, white (naturally), gelding (symbolism is

important) and swung herself into the saddle. She cantered out of town, waving her sword and singing fierce-sounding

nonsense she'd picked up from Chi Xe. You never knew who was watching.

Her camp was three leagues from town in a wooded dingle. She dismounted Grandiere, removed his tack, let him

drink, wiped him down and tethered him where he could graze.

Her horse attended to, she took care of herself. She stripped off the gold-and-emerald headband, and the auburn

wig underneath it, rolled the huge sword in the flashy cloak and disengaged the uncomfortably located daggers. In a few

moments, she was her wilderness self; short black hair, leather travelling clothes, hunting dagger at waist and short sword in

easy reach near the campfire.

Feeling relaxed and ready for real business, Allys unwrapped her purchase. She picked it up by the shoulders and

shook it. The mail links rattled like a dry cough. Flakes of rust and dust showered down. It looked battered, decrepit, and

decidedly unmagical. It also looked too damn small for her.

Gritting her teeth, Allys slid the hauberk over her head. To her surprise, it fit perfectly. She brushed the links down.

They rattled.

Take it off.

Allys froze.

Take it off, now!

Allys laid her hand on her sword. The voice wasn't coming from any direction. It was just there.

Take this damn shirt off and go away, hear me? I don't need any cheapskate barbarian wannabe getting

blood on me!

Allys's heart beat hard at the base of her throat.

No, I am not the shirt. Flaming fig-trees, you've got an untidy mind up here. Where'd you get all these…

zenny?… ideas? Oh, the Mystic East. Foreign Parts, I should have known. No, I said that already. I am not the shirt.

I am the woman stuck in the shirt. Damn family curse. Blessing Aunt Didi said, but she liked waving swords around.

Every woman of the d'Rainier line who died in battle takes a turn in the shirt, giving her skills to the current wearer.

Well, I was battling the mentha veridis in the kitchen garden when the lights went out, and now there are no more

women in the D'Rainier line and I'm stuck in here!

As quickly as she could, Allys yanked the hauberk off. She dropped the shirt onto the ground. It rattled for a

moment, then lay still on the dirt and dead leaves.

Not good. Not good at all.

The prophecy said she needed to be wearing the D'Rainier armor to retake the castle. Maybe that cranky soul in

there knew a secret entrance, or some special weakness that belonged to the Evil Wizard who occupied the place. Problem.

Cranky obviously did not like being stuck in the hauberk and needed the death of another D'Rainier woman to get her out.

There was one, too. Whoever that was in there obviously didn't know that Ganelle D'Rainier had escaped and fled the

country when the castle was taken over. Ganelle wandered with the horse nomads of the Mystic East and had a daughter

who had a daughter, who had come back and bought the armor from Drethwain. What if the spirit in the rusty chain mail

decided to get Allys into a battle so Allys could die and take her place?

This was very, very not good. Especially since Cranky in there could obviously read Allys's mind.

Allys did not believe in trying to outwit prophecies. Wizards, daemons,

Evil-Gods-from-the-Foulest-Regions-of-the-Seven-Hells, yes, but, prophecies, no. They always came back to bite you on

your more intimate leathers. She was told she needed to be wearing the D'Rainier armor, so wear it she would. But how

could she keep Cranky from rummaging around in her head and getting… ideas?

Allys sat down cross-legged and regarded the hauberk.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

"DoyouknowwhoIam?"Allyspulledherselfuptoherfullheight.Herflaming,auburncurlsbrushedtheshop'slowceiling.Theshopkeeperdidnotlookimpressed."YouareAllystheBold,SwordswomanoftheMysticEast,daughterofFerra,daughterofGanelled'Rainier,orsoyousaid.ButIamDrethwain,ShopkeeperoftheFirstOrderandinthenameofmyfamil...

展开>> 收起<<

Sarah Zettel - A Young Swordswoman's Garden Primer.pdf

共10页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Sarah Zettel - A Young Swordswoman's Garden Primer

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: