Free Return by Peter S. Beagle; Maurizio Manzieri Page B

defenders for whom Master Caldrea unhesitatingly gave his life. How can I pass by such an opportunity, tell me that?”
    The horses were all stamping and whinnying anxiously now, as Brother Laska kept coming after me and I kept backing, sidestepping and dancing away. But a stable is a limited arena for a man trying not to be cornered, and the advantage is all with the attacker. I said, “You saved my life. I do not want to kill you. I don’t want to fight you at all.”
    Brother Laska replied with a swing of the Corcorua sword that came so close I had to leap up on a haybale to keep from losing a leg on the spot. I pointed out desperately that the monks who had seen us together that night would indeed talk—“and how will you explain that you stood with me against the Hunters? That you took a Hunter’s head yourself before ever you took mine? Had you thought at all about that, old man?”
    I had hoped to anger him, calling him that, and perhaps to goad him into a foolish mistake. But he kept coming, “Old man, aye—and what can a frail old man do in the hands of a maniacal killer? You dragged me along on your mission of massacre, and I was so shaken and so terrified that when I tried to kill you I slew a Hunter instead, by awful accident. But when it is known that I avenged them all, and avenged our blessed Master Caldrea as well…why, I would not be surprised if they named me his successor.” He beamed at me, his jagged smile no longer grotesquely endearing, but the bared fangs of a predator. “Would you be surprised?”
    “No,” I said. “I must admit I would not be at all surprised.” And with that I threw the last strength remaining to me into a twisting leap from an overturned barrel to the top of a stall door, which I rode swinging straight into Brother Laska, knocking him down and jarring the sword from his hands. I was on it—and then him—in an instant, pressing the flat of the blade to his throat with the palm of one hand, grinning with my teeth clenched tightly, and rasping, “But not tonight, Brother, not tonight. This night, this head stays on these shoulders.” And I patted his wrinkled cheek insultingly, as one pats a child. As the Hunter had done to me.
    And my own trimoira dagger came up from the stable floor in his free left hand, missing my neck, gouging the flesh over my collarbone. There was that much fight in him still; and more yet, as we wrestled for the dagger. Even then, truly, I was not trying to kill him, but only to hold him off while keeping the trimoira out of his reach. But my left hand was on the sword against his throat, and I felt something go, collapsing under the increased pressure. He coughed, and his eyes widened, and he looked for a moment as puzzled as a child. Then he shivered once, just the one long shiver, and died beneath me. It was that fast, and that quiet.
    There were spades in the stable. I carried him outside and buried him and his ancient sword under a wild bilibro bush, which bears great purple flowers in the spring. The blood from my gashed shoulder fell on the petals. When I was done, I said aloud, “You were not always a doorkeeper, Brother. Sunlight on your road.”
    When I turned toward the stable again, I saw the monks. Four or five of them, all faces I recognized from the firelit circle around Master Caldrea and the Tree. “I have done what I came to do,” I said. “I wish no harm to any of you. Let me pass.”
    None of them moved, neither to permit nor to hinder me.
    I took a pace toward them, a very weary hand on the hilt of the trimoira dagger, seriously doubting whether I had strength enough remaining to pull it from my belt. But the oldest monk—Brother Thymanos by name, a tall man with thin blue lips—stepped forward to say, “We have come to offer you all that your passage has left us.” I stared at him. Thymanos continued, “Caldrea is dead. The Hunters are ended with the Tree. If this house is to survive, it must do so, not only