Suddenly realizing the pair’s intention — to split the Arnems’ strength by posing a threat to the house and Isadora within — Arnem shouts, “We do not break the concentration of our force, Dagobert. First, this man!” At which he lifts his shield, swiftly hacks the sword arm of the Guardsman who was in the center of the path off below the elbow, then pulls the piteously screaming man forward so that Dagobert — who has divined his father’s purpose, and raised his own blade into a side stance with both arms in preparation — can and does deliver the killing blow, driving his sword under the flailing, partially severed arm of the man and deep into his chest. It could almost be called a dauthu-bleith, for the speed with which it puts an end to the man’s suffering, were it not for the murderous intent that had spurred the attacker on in the first place. “Now for the other two,” Arnem orders, stepping forward to snatch the sword from the severed hand and arm of the dead Guardsman. “Quickly, Dagobert,” he continues, turning and bounding toward the house. “Before those that remain at the gate realize their momentary advantage!”
To realize such an advantage, however, the Guardsmen would have had to have gained experience of such combat, and against such opponents, on at least a few earlier occasions, rather than spending nearly all their time bullying citizens of and visitors to Broken, and occasionally doing such murder as has served the purposes of their now-fallen (though they know it not) commander. And so the leader of the small group and his two remaining lackeys remain at the garden gateway, watching as the latest of their contrived assaults is foiled: Arnem, when he is still several steps from the terrace outside the door of his house, hurls the dead Guardsman’s sword with prodigious force into the back of the kicking, hammering attacker directly before him, and the flying blade catches the man in the left shoulder, nearly penetrating to the front of his chest but not completely disabling him. Arnem therefore cries out:
“Engage the wounded man, Dagobert — leave the other to me!”
Father and son quickly exchange positions upon the terrace, Dagobert taking the right and striking at the man who is reaching for the blade in his back, but who is quick, nonetheless, to lift his own sword with his intact right arm to meet Dagobert’s initial blow. In an instant, all the training he has witnessed and been allowed to take part in during drills upon the quadrangles of the Fourth District moves directly through the youth’s thoughts and into his limbs, and he finds that, although the Guardsman’s physical power is prodigious, even given his wound, he simply has not the skills that Dagobert has learned through long hours of practice. Dagobert more than stands his own — but soon grows worried, as, glancing at the garden gateway, he sees that the remaining assassins have gathered their courage and are making for the engagement outside the door of the Arnem house.
“Father—?” he just has time to say, before his opponent has the opportunity to raise a leg and plant it in his chest, knocking him back upon the terrace. Dagobert has the presence of mind to keep hold of his sword, and fends off his wounded opponent’s first attack; but he will have to struggle to regain his footing, a fact not lost on Arnem, who quickly dispatches his own Guardsman, using several blows struck with all the fury of a father, not a commander. Yet he is nonetheless forced to leave Dagobert to continue to contend with his own enemy, and to rush back into the garden pathway, blocking it with his shield and preparing to meet odds of three to one: ominous, he knows, whatever his earlier claims, even when one is facing unpracticed killers.
But face them he does, just as Dagobert gets to his own feet and regains a fighting stance against his own Guardsman, who is growing weak through the pain and loss of blood caused by the sword in his shoulder. Yet the two fights remain stalemates, at best: Arnem levels his forearm so that his shield faces the three healthy Guardsmen horizontally, which fends two of them off, if only for the most part: the yantek takes a cut to the upper portion of his shield arm, but it is not deep enough to stop him from keeping the two men at bay, while his sword goes to work on the third. Dagobert, meanwhile, struggles hard to hold his ground, yet cannot quite gain the decisive position against his opponent. The moment has come for the two defenders of the Arnem home to receive some kind of aid — and it comes from a most unexpected source:
The door of the house, which Sixt and Dagobert have worked so hard to keep closed, suddenly flies open, and — with a cry that is reminiscent of the women warriors of her own, once-powerful northern people, most of whom are long since dead or scattered, by now — Isadora drives a northern raider’s sword (also taken from Sixt’s collection) through the back of the man facing Dagobert with her own right arm. In her left hand she carries a Broken wooden-shafted long spear, which she tosses into the air just above her head and right shoulder, snatching it with her right hand as if she, too, knows the ways of Broken’s best soldiers, and then hurls it with impressive force at the Guardsman who is engaging her husband’s sword arm, and therefore stands clear of her husband’s shield and is the easiest target. The spear catches the man fully in the chest, knocking him back several feet and to the ground, where he lies in a momentary, dying attempt to regain his footing, before coughing out his last, bloody breaths.
Dagobert pauses only an instant to gaze at his mother in bewilderment, before she cries: “Well? You two may have thought me useless in this fight, Dagobert, but I refuse to be — now, go and assist your father!”
And with his own warlike cry, Dagobert propels himself over most of the terrace and into the man on Arnem’s left, who has not expected such assistance from either the youth or the woman. Initially as bewildered as was his son at Isadora’s fearsome appearance, Sixt nonetheless loses no time, now, in dispatching the man on his right, outdoing his swordsmanship (if any Guardsman can truly be said to possess such a skill) with several terrible strokes of the sword arm that have brought him such fame from the eastern frontiers of the kingdom to the Atta Pass. After knocking the Guardsman’s blade from his hand, it takes the yantek but two mighty strokes down on either side of his enemy’s neck to nearly hack the man’s head and neck off by slicing through each of his collarbones. Without pause, Arnem turns to assist his son: but finds that Dagobert has become determined enough by the assistance of his mother not to require such help from both of his parents to face the last of the Guardsmen, the leader and braggart who had been tasked with the murder of the three people who now stand still alive. Driving his sword in a final moment of screaming rage into the fool’s gaping mouth — a most fitting final thrust — Dagobert pulls his blade free as the man falls to the ground, instantly dead. The eldest Arnem son then finally crouches upon one knee, working hard to catch his breath.
Upon seeing the blood that now flows, more freely than dangerously, from her husband’s arm, Isadora loses her momentary fury and resumes her more familiar role as healer. Tearing a sleeve of her own gown free to use as a bandage, she wraps it around Sixt’s wound, and then looks over her shoulder at her son.