She cringed and started reflexively to double over, and a left hook sent her sprawling.
“His father’s sitting at Moradin’s side, laughin’ at us,” said the king. As he spoke, the other of the young sisters went somersaulting aside yet again, the victim of a beautifully appearanceI holding onbalanced parry, hook, and throw.
“I’m guessin’ that Arr Arr’s jaw’s hanging as open as yer own,” Muttonchops replied. “Moradin’s too.”
They came at him in a long line, a stream of attackers, sometimes two at once, and in the end, the last four together.
This wasn’t Little Arr Arr they were battling, but Bruenor Battlehammer, King of Mithral Hall, the great warrior who had held back Obould’s hordes in Keeper’s Dale beyond Mithral Hall’s western gate.
And it was Bruenor Battlehammer who had sat upon the throne of Gauntlgrym, who had heard the words of Moradin, the whispers of Dumathoin and the battle shouts of Clangeddin. Though he wore the frame of a child’s body, inferior to those of his older attackers, his understanding of balance and movement kept those attackers constantly turning and shifting, often right into each other, and always clumsily.
And whenever that happened, Bruenor’s fighting stick invariably and painfully cracked against an opponent’s skull.
In the very first moments of that last assault, four coming at him furiously, Bruenor had stopped their charge and tied them up with misdirection, feinting left, then right, then left again so smoothly that the edges of the foursome collapsed upon the middle.
He swept the legs out of the teenage dwarf the farthest to his left, half-turned and backhand stabbed the second in line, then pivoted the other way to parry and roll around the stabbing sticks of the remaining two. Running back out to the right afforded him a few moments of single combat with the one on that end of the line. He stabbed, pulled up short and swept across, taking his opponent’s weapon and her balance with him, then reversed suddenly and snapped his fighting stick across her chin, dazing her. In a one-on-one fight, Bruenor would have let it end there, but this opponent had three allies, after all, and so he leaped up and spun, lifting his stick over his head, and came around with a resounding chop that knocked the dwarfling girl senseless, and shattered Bruenor’s fighting stick in the process.
He dived to the floor, retrieving her stick-she wasn’t going to need it any longer, after all-and just managed to turn sidelong and brace the butt of the stick against his hip as the next in line leaped at him.
If it had been an actual spear instead of a blunt stick, that second dwarf would have surely impaled himself. The stick bowed but did not break. The flying dwarf bowed as well, doubling over the forward end, eyes going wide, breath blasted from him. He hung there for what seemed like an eternity, feet off the floor, until the momentum played out and Bruenor’s stick dipped, dropping him back to his feet.
He didn’t stay on his feet for long, however, grabbing at his belly, wailing in shock and pain, and tumbling to the side.
“Are ye having fun, then?” Bruenor roared, becoming disgusted with this whole ridiculous exercise. “Are ye, damned Moradin?”
The blasphemy drew more than a few gasps around the room, but Bruenor hardly heard them. Up again, he launched himself at the remaining two, his stick whirling with seeming abandon, though in truth, in perfectly timed and aimed angles and strikes. He cried out with every hit, his voice filling the air, and soon, so too did his two opponents cry out in pain and terror. They turned and fled … or tried to.
asked, and Catti-brie nodded.igh holding onBruenor kicked the feet out from under the nearest, the same poor dwarf whose legs he had swept out at the beginning of the encounter. He ran right over the poor lad, stomping him flat. He couldn’t catch the other one, though, for she was older and faster, so he hoisted his fighting stick like a javelin and let fly.
The missile caught the poor girl right in the back of the neck and sent her sprawling to the floor in a cloud of dust.
“Are ye having fun, then?” an outraged Bruenor yelled at Muttonchops and King Emerus.
“Promote him at once to the town guard,” King Emerus mumbled to Muttonchops Stonehammer.
“But ’e’s just a laddie.”
“He’ll be trainin’ with the adults,” the king sharply replied. “Take him to new heights of prowess.” He paused and looked Muttonchops in the eye. “And humble him. Three gods as me witness, I’ll not again be hearin’ the son of Reginald Roundshield blaspheme Moradin.”
“Yes, me king,” Muttonchops said with a low bow.
And so began the next journey for Bruenor, where he would spend the next three years on the training grounds with the finest warriors of Citadel Felbarr-and where he would spend most of those brutal sessions on the floor, truth be told.
But for the angry young dwarf, that journey was not humbling.
Just infuriating.
The Year of the Final Stand (1475 DR) Citadel Felbarr
The young dwarf, Reginald Roundshield, had gained much notice in Citadel Felbarr. Every clan in the city buzzed about “Arr Arr’s tough son,” no longer referring to this teenager as “Arr Arr’s little boy.” For though he had seen no action outside of the city guard’s training grounds, his strength and battle prowess had been nothing short of amazing, given his tender age and his still small and underdeveloped body.
For the one named Reginald Roundshield, who had been named Bruenor Battlehammer in his previous existence, the whispers that followed him to the training grounds each morning and home again late each night did nothing to flatter him, and everything to remind him of how ridiculous this whole process had become.
Day after day, tenday after tenday, month after month, and now year after year, he had played the game and assumed the role: “child prod’gy,” they said.
“A fittin’ tribute to Arr Arr!” they whispered behind his solitary walks.
Even, “Clangeddin reborn!”
For a long while, the whispers bothered Bruenor, particularly the most outrageous, as if the dwarf gods had any part in the travesty that had put him back in Faerun instead of granting him his due to sit beside them in his well-earned place of honor. Now, though, he didn’t even hear the whispers or the applause, and when he did, he didn’t let the words sink in below a cursory level of awareness. He went to the training grounds and he fought, viciously, tirelessly, and fearlessly, and came home each night battered and bruised and exhausted.
Yes, exhausted most of all, because exhaustion was his defense against the restless sleep he too often fell into. Even his dreams proved disjointed and off-balance, interspersing the experiences of his previous life with those of this existon of a son of a son of a son of a captainan in any caseimence. And worse, those dreams, like his thoughts, too often contained a scowling image of Moradin.
He sat in his bedchamber one night, wrapping bandages around the newest wounds on one forearm-how had he missed such an easy parry?
“Nah, not missed,” he stubbornly told himself, for the block had been good, but his still immature muscles had not given him the strength to properly deflect the veteran warrior’s blow far enough from his exposed shield arm. But he had indeed erred in not anticipating that, he reminded himself. He had gone for the kill in the sparring match, trying a complicated cross-body deflection with his wooden axe instead of the safer block with his buckler. If he had been older and stronger, he would have properly pushed that striking wooden sword out wide enough, and left himself in perfect balance to smack the fool across the face with a “killing” backhand.
But he was not older and stronger, and so he had lost the match. “Keep tellin’ yerself that,” Bruenor counseled, for while little mattered to him in those dark days of his young second life, he wanted above all else to beat them all, to knock down these city guards one after another and stand atop the bleeding pile!