"Even all these months after our wedding night," Owain taunted, holding up his bloodstained blade. "First blood still belongs to me."

If Owain had meant it as a joke for the audience, no one laughed. If he’d meant to provoke Ashlynn, she hardly seemed to care. A thin rivulet of blood flowed down her arm, but it barely stained her arming jacket. The wound was superficial, and Ashlynn had learned long ago to ignore far worse pain than this.

"Where did all that fire go?" Owain asked as he stalked forward. "No words now that blood’s been spilled?"

Ashlynn didn’t bother to dignify his taunting with a response. Her eyes were focused on his sword while her body had returned to a forward, centered guard, but other than that, she wasted no energy or thought on a man who wasn’t yet in range of her blade.

Instead, her mind worked furiously as she tried to understand how he was drawing strength from the Ancient Oak in the hilt of his sword. A piece of ancient oak, even a small branch, was an immensely potent tool in the right hands. That was one of the reasons she’d asked the Ancient Oak in the Vale of Mists for a piece to use as her wand. Likewise, the amount of wood used in the hilt of a longsword was substantial, and the strength a warrior gained from wielding such a weapon would be noticeable. 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

But it wouldn’t be anywhere near as extreme as Owain’s strength, which meant there had to be something more to it...

Owain came at her again before she’d finished the thought.

Despite his irritation at the way she seemed to be ignoring him, Owain’s advance was smooth and methodical. If she wouldn’t respond to his words, she’d certainly respond to his blade. I came at her from a high guard again, hammering downward with enough force that Ashlynn would either have to move or...

-CLANG!-

Steel sang as Fallen Claw slid along Water’s Edge as Ashlynn brought her blade parallel to the ground with one hand on the hilt and the other on the spine of the sword. She felt the vibration travel up her arm and into her teeth even as she rotated at the waist, dropping the tip of Water’s Edge just enough for most of the force of Owain’s attack to flow past her.

Owain’s recovery was smooth, and a heartbeat later, he was pressing her again.

-CLANG CLANG CLANG!-

Owain’s attacks were coming faster now, and Ashlynn received more than one of those heavy blows on the breastplate of her armor when she couldn’t recover quickly enough from one position to the next. Owain resisted her counterattacks far too smoothly, and even though his strength had long ago passed the limits of an ordinary man, he never seemed to over-commit the way Mountain Breaker would have forced him to.

Against a normal person of greater skill, Ashlynn’s absolute advantages of vampiric speed and strength, the gifts she’d received as part of her blood bond with Nyrielle, would have been enough for her to do as she pleased in the fight despite the gaps in technique. Against a person who could match her physically, however, her ability to control the flow of the battle was so thin as to be non-existent.

It had never once occurred to her that there would be some form of sorcery binding Owain to his blade. If it had, she would have tried to observe it while others were speaking during his trial. Now, she had to find a way to observe the power flowing through his weapon even as he was battering her with it, and the narrow field of view offered by the slit in her helmet’s visor did very little to help.

The narrow slit of her visor framed him in a strip of vision no wider than her hand, and every time her head turned a fraction off true, half of him slipped out of her sight. She had to keep her face square to him or lose sight of his blade.

Doing that cost her. It made her a far more vulnerable target, and Owain seemed to sense that there was an opening there as he shifted back into an ox-guard before thrusting the point of his blade directly at the slit in her visitor.

-CLANG!-

Her block was awkward as she tried to use the upswept quillion on Water’s edge to capture and pin his blade. It was a silly move, one she wasn’t well positioned to succeed with, but she did it anyway because she wanted to see him... Or more accurately, she wanted to see the flow of energy between him and the blade so that she could understand what it was doing, and how she could stop it.

Ashlynn never imagined that she’d need her Severing Knife for this duel, and she’d resolutely left it behind, along with her wand and witch’s hat, when she left the Vale of Mists. She couldn’t afford to be exposed, and even if most people would mistake it for an ordinary knife, between the Inquisition and the High Priest, it would have been too risky to be seen with.

So, since she couldn’t cleanly sever the sorcery of Owain’s strange sword, she would have to understand if she wanted to have any hope of defeating him, and for that, she’d have to take a much closer look at his blade....

Closer...

A slow smile spread on Ashlynn’s lips as she heard Jacque’s voice in the back of her mind, telling her exactly what to do.

"When you fightin’ a man like me, wit’ skin thick as cypress bark and hide tough as gator leather, yeah, your fists can’t do much more dan tickle an’ annoy," he’d told her while they sparred in the depths of the Briar, waiting for Heila to finish her trial of witchcraft.

"So don’t you go hittin’ a man like me wit’ your fists, cher," Jacques reminded her. "You hit him wit’ de ground, de roots of de trees, somet’ing real uncomfortable to land on. You pitch a man over, get him fallin’ hard enough, and de earth, she do de punchin’ for you, all over his whole body at once, or just de one spot, if you land him right, yeah."

-CLAANG-

Fallen Claw rang of Water’s edge yet again as Owain attempted to push his advantage further, but this time, Ashlynn neither deflected nor retreated. This time, she stepped in...