He grinned, his pointed teeth shiny with saliva. “Oh, look at you, fat man.

So brave now. So big. Still knowing nothing. Still wishing you were Kidona. Eh?” I towered over him, dwarfing him in girth as well as height.

Still he did not fear me. I summoned all my disdain. “If you are Kidona, then I do not wish to be Kidona.” I drew on all my knowledge of his people to make my insults sting. “Look at you. You are poor! I see no women here, no taldi, no smoke rack of meat. The gods despise you.”

I saw my words hit him like flung stones. Shame tried to stir in me, that I would attack someone in his situation, but I held it down. He was not beaten. If I wanted to wring answers from him, I must first dominate him.

From some depth of courage in his soul, he summoned a grin and retorted, “Yet I am still Kidona. And you, you are still her plaything. Look at you, all swollen up with her magic like a sore toe full of pus. The fat old woman claimed you, and made you her puppet.”

His words jabbed me and I retorted without thinking, “Her puppet? Her plaything? I think not. I did what you could not do. I crossed the bridge, and with the iron magic of my people, I laid her belly open. I defeated her, old man. What you could not do, even using me as your tool, I did alone.” I struck a pose I remembered from our days together. I threw out my chest and lifted my head high, the same posture he had held whenever he wished to express how far above me he was. “I have always been stronger than you, Dewara. Even when I lay unconscious before you, you still dared not kill me.”

I watched him, trying to gauge his weakness in this battle of exchanged brags. To the west of us, the sun was dying in a welter of reds and purples.

It was hard to read his features in the fading light. Perhaps a shadow of doubt brushed Dewara’s eyes, but he brazened it out. “I could have killed you if I wished,” he said disdainfully. “It would have been like crushing a hatchling in the nest. I thought of it. You were useless to me. You claim to have killed her? Well, where is your proof? You brag like a child. When I sent you against her, you fell like a child. I witnessed that! The weakness of your people made you fail, not my Kidona magic. You were not strong of heart; you did not have the will to do what you should have done. If you had not spoken to the guardian, if you had rushed forward and killed her as I commanded, then all of our lives would be better now. But no! You are so wise, soldier’s boy, you think you know more than a Kidona warrior.