ficbits for all ages
It took a total of three strikes: one to an arm, backswing into someone’s stomach and, after locking the weapons together, and a spinning sweep which felled the rest. The offenders lay prone, some shifting weakly; still alive. Good. The men were foolish to think that such an attempt would ever succeed, and the matter of how they’d managed to rob good Imperial servants of their armor would be one they’d have to look into. Someone had to live long enough to be questioned. Drace nudged a groaning man with her boot. She let the smaller head of her club staff rest in one of the cracked circles it’d left upon its final impact.
The boy was crying.
At first she’d thought he’d been injured after all. “My lord?” The Judge Magister turned, alarmed. He bore no visible wounds, but perhaps there was something more severe that she did not see. “My lord, does something ail you?” The child stared up at her with blank eyes, his mouth desperately squared, and suddenly she understood. She laid her weapon aside.
“My lord,” she said, dutifully. “All is well.”
He goggled at her approach. He did not back away as her shadow fell over him. In this, a four year old had just bested several grown men in armor.
“Lord Larsa,” she said, reaching up to the clasps of her helm as she knelt. “No harm will come to you.”
She pulled it off, shaking out her hair. It’d been crushed against her cheeks. Larsa gasped. He had never seen a Judge a remove their head before. “You see? It is I. No one else.”
“Oh,” said Larsa. He reached up a small hand to touch her face, as though wondering at the true humanity of it. That she should be a being covered in skin and not damascan steel. “Oh,” he said again, swallowing his sobs. He put his arms around her neck and, much to her surprise, clung as though his life depended on it. Five minutes ago it truly had.
“You must be brave,” whispered Drace; gently, for it was no rebuke. “We are Judge Magister. We are with you.”
She had no great gift with children. The boy held fast until the rest of her men had arrived. He could not be persuaded to let her go.