1:3 Silverhag.

An overly curious rat woke me up, and was rewarded with a crushed skull.

It has never served anyone any good to surprise me.

I climbed out of my hiding space and carefully dusted myself off in the noonday sun.  The decent back down to street level wasn't difficult, given the fact that the roof of the house had caved in before I got there, and one could easily simply slide carefully down into the tatty little bare shack.  What I wasn't expecting- especially since there wasn't even a chair to sit on in there- was that the place was occupied.

A pair of silver eyes looked up at me immediately. No sooner than I'd seen them, I was dodging two wickedly serrated spike shuriken.  I moved from one side to another while each one whizzed close enough to my ears that I heard them whistle in the air.

"My hair's short enough, I thank m'lady so very kindly," I said flatly, drawing my dagger.  "If you're going to throw any more of those, you better not miss."

And wonder of wonders, the joyless, silver eyed dancer smiled.

"The handmaiden will do her best not to miss," she whispered joyfully, as though she had received the most precious thing in the world.  "I am for you, mistress."

She hurled two more shuriken at me, and, true to her word, she got one of them to nick my shoulder.  Seconds after, the lithe thing had leaped up from the dark corner, which seemed to suddenly get a little brighter when she moved, and posed herself to do hand to hand combat.

  

I carefully edged toward her, my blade at the ready, expecting her to ball her fists.  Instead, she reached over her shoulders and drew two beautifully ornamented katars that looked as though they belonged in a museum, instead of in a live fight. I wondered briefly where on earth in or outside of her bodice had she managed to cram them, and then got angry at myself for caring.

  

I edged toward the shadows of the caved in roof, but suddenly found the dancer behind me, jabbing both katars into my back.  Without another thought, I hustled over to the place that she herself had been two moments ago.  Quickly, I sent a blazing shot of balefire toward her, and it engulfed her totally.  I expected to hear at least a cry of surprise, but instead I was greeted by genuine laughter.

I've never been good at magic- actually, I hate the stuff- but fire spells aren't supposed to tickle.

The dancer gave a small, wordless cry as she dropped to the floor and rolled around, but it sounded as though she were begging for a new toy or a bit of coveted candy.  The flames went out completely within a few moments, apparently without doing any damage at all.  Her hair wasn't so much as singed, although the small place did smell horribly of smoke.

"I guess you're having fun," I said breathlessly as I watched her get to her feet without any difficulty at all.  "Your turn- attack me now, come on."

With a smile, she became a flurry of thrusts and parries, challenging my every block and dodging my every blow.  Metal sang on metal again and again- I wasn't even thinking of the town outside, the marketplace or the guards.  I could focus only on the swirling steps of this slender, graceful warrior as I made sure to give her no advantage, no ground, no bit of flesh.

So the guard who broke down the door and surprised me was rewarded with a dagger to the center of the head.  For a split second, even I didn't realize what I'd done.  Then I turned to the dancer.

I noticed her one empty hand over her mouth, and would have laughed at her wide, shining eyes, had I not felt suddenly strange when I really looked at them.  The laugh came when I turned to retrieve my weapon, and found her missing katar nestled quite comfortably in the poor fool's neck.  A small noise squeaked out of the dancer behind me, and I turned over my shoulder to look at her.

"Is he...?" the dancer dared, her silvery eyes gleaming with a strange fear.

"Long gone.  To whatever god will have him," I replied, tugging her katar out of the idiot's bleeding throat.  I wiped it off on his tunic and tossed it to her.  For however badly she may have felt about the situation, she easily snatched the hilt right out of the air, then sheathed the clean weapon safely behind her.

"We'd better do something about this," I prompted, pressing my approval of her dexterity down within myself.

"Unless you've got good coin, they hang even for an attempt at murder, and well do I know it.  I don't think the birds have so much as thought to land upon my best friend as yet."  She walked over to the guard, sighed and squatted down next to him to take a good look at his face. "I could at least have hoped this was his hangman, but no such fortune."

"You traveled here with your best friend?" I asked, looking about for something with which I could dig.  Not a twig could be spotted in the room, so I headed toward the cold hearth.  Again I felt awkward for caring anything about how she'd come, with whom and for what.  But I did, all the same.

She, for her part, sighed and hummed as she shifted to sit down on her behind.  "We practically grew up together, back in the Shadowfell.  He left because he was bored with it, bored with the darkness, the fighting, Shar's slow pull down to into her nothingness.  'No one laughs,' he always said.  'No one dances.  Everyone kills and is killed, all anyone wants is power.'  I didn't fully understand why he should tell me how he felt, but I... didn't have much choice but to listen.  Besides, everyone in the commune avoided me because they thought I was... strange-"

I found nothing in the old ashes of the hearth, and dusted my hands off with a sigh.  "Strange?" I asked simply.

"My eyes are unusual for a Shadar-kai," she replied quietly, lowering her gaze when I turned to look at her.  "People thought I was blind, sickly, or somehow cursed at birth- something.  Warriors wouldn't train me.  Artists refused to touch me.  The only tattoo I have was done in the Underdark.  Even mages avoided me- I could only learn spells secretly, when my best friend wasn't watching-"  She looked up from the body to me, and must have suddenly realized what I was doing.  "The guard broke down the door- we can use the pieces."

"For kindling, to burn him?" I smiled wickedly.  "I like the way you think.  If you stand watch, I'll see if fire works better on him than it does on you."

She got up and began to gather the pieces of door carefully.  "If the handmaiden might advise her mistress, it might be a miscalculation of the necessary potential force against the efficacy..."

When she turned around and noticed that I was staring at her blankly, she pressed her lips between her teeth, allowing the edges of her mouth to pull down sharply for just a second.  I wasn't sure whether that meant she was disappointed or truly unhappy, but she didn't give me time to guess.

"I mean... you might not have put enough willpower into the spell to make it work as you intended," she finished shyly, holding out the pieces she'd gathered to me.

The walk across the room to get them seemed to me to be the longest, most uncomfortable trip I'd ever taken.

We both stood in silence for a few more moments before she turned and grabbed the guard by his hands.  I threw the pieces of door into the cold hearth, then walked over and grabbed his feet.  Together we slid him to the foot of the hearth, then paused to breathe.  The jerk wasn't light.

"It'll be a pain for me to lie down to sleep, though; It was quite warm."

"I'll bet," I spat, much more roughly than I intended.  "I'm Mi'ishaen, by the way."  In order to avoid the awkwardness of that introduction, I got to work on the man's elbow joints with my blade without looking up at the dancer.  "You can call me any derivative of it that you can say."

"It's not so tough," the dancer smiled, putting one of her katars to use on the other elbow.  "Mine is Jyklihaimra.  Neither my mother nor anyone else back home could say it properly, so absolutely no one actually called me that.  They called me what it meant instead."

I dug my dagger in the guy's shoulder and raised my eyebrows at the rogue dancer across from me.  "You do realize what the next question will be, I trust?"

"Silverhag," she shrugged.  "I don't know why she let- anyway, I'm not even a good witch, let alone a hag.  I only know a few spells."

"I'm not calling you either one of those," I decided, lighting the fatty flesh of the man's lower arm with a weak bit of balefire.  "We'll just have to find you a new name."

"Oh, it's not that-" the girl began slowly.  "I mean, I've... I've had that name for all my life.  It hardly matters now."

We worked for a while in silence, finishing the cutting and heaving.  The guard's trunk was the worst part- heavy, bloody, and leaking other things I'd rather not talk about.  When the dancer started gagging, I shoved her out of the way with my hips and heaved the slab of former Human being as far into the hearth as I could by myself.  It was about a solid minute's worth of struggle- maybe more, since I wasn't immune to how disgusting it was.

"How's Silveredge, instead?" I managed, once I'd finished.  "That second set of shuriken almost got me, you know.  I've a good mind not to help you find them, whatever they're stuck in, in here.  I'm lucky I've got good armor, or they'd have been in me."

She didn't have to say anything to agree to the name.  The glistening platinum gaze she turned on me said it all.