Ritva ducked and batted the blade aside with her buckler, a hard bang and ring of metal; a whirling two-pound Frisbee of edged metal thrown by a strong man was not something to be taken lightly. Her body was already moving forward, feet positioning for the lunge that would slam her point into the back of the soldier’s neck above the edge of his lorica. A sweet inevitability of motion, truth in bone and nerve and metal—

Shawonda Thurston’s desperate face was looking over his metal-clad shoulder, eyes enormous. She wrapped her arms around his neck in a convulsive movement, her head jammed into his shoulder.

“No!” she screamed. “Don’t! Don’t!”

Ritva’s battle-trance broke at the desperate appeal. She diverted the killing lunge upward with a wrenching effort, and her body slammed into the young man’s back and bounced off it; he was hard-braced, and the combined weight of him and his armor and the girl were twice her mass. The soldier and Shawonda stumbled backward without falling, but they were close to it.

Ritva moved again, but this time she reversed the weapon. The fishtail pommel of her long sword had an outer rim like the edge of a blunt chisel. She struck with it against the young man’s head, behind the ear. He didn’t go absolutely limp; you couldn’t hit someone in the head that hard in a combat situation and be sure you weren’t killing them. He did lose all interest in everything but lying still and hurting as the shock rattled his brain in its fluid casing. Shawonda released him and stared at his body lying at her feet.

“He’ll live,” Ritva said, and shook her with a push of buckler on shoulder. “Pull yourself together, girl!”

Shawonda did; she took a couple of sobbing breaths and then crouched to pull the wound pack from the soldier’s belt. She ripped the pad open with her teeth and strapped it against the wound in his left arm with a swiftness that showed she’d taken first-aid courses.

“He was nice,” she said, with tears tracking down her face and diluting the red spatters that flecked it. “He talked to me when his sergeant wasn’t there.”

Then she stumbled back to her mother, wiping her hands on her skirt. The older woman put an arm around her and hugged both her daughters to her body, nodding over them at the Dúnedain.

Ritva spared time for one sharp nod back, then looked down at the soldier for an instant. Her lips quirked, and she dropped back into Edhellen: “You are one lucky son of a bitch. You really got a triple return tripled on chatting her up like that!”