Excerpts from the Okal Rel Universe...

copyright Lynda Williams

VRELLISH GRACES (From draft novella, Golden Souls, by Lynda Williams)

Just then, a horse thundered up the drive well ahead of the rest of the honor guard, and plunged through the knot of people holding Amel, knocking down two of them. The rest scattered.

The rider wore flight leathers with the crossed swords of Vrel on the left breast. He tried to grab for Amel but his horsemanship was criminal. The horse turned in a hard circle, resisting the use of excessive force. It was answered with more force, pulling its mouth open and its neck into a hairpin bend.

"No! Vretla!" Amel took a glancing body blow from the horse's shoulder, but stayed up, clutching at the reins. "Relax!"

"Tell it!" The rider cried back.

The voice of the rider, even through the intervening glass, was puzzling. It was not a man's after all. But it was too deep and unrestrained to be a woman's. Dela looked harder.

The lean figure in the saddle could be female: if a woman could be powerful, small breasted and brutal. The rider's oval face had vaguely feline proportions, with wide eyes and a broad mouth. At the moment her lips were drawn back in a grimace as she hung on with muscular thighs, pulling back on the reins too hard.

"Let up!" Amel got hold of the sword sheath strapped to the rider's leg and was half dragged, trying to force some slack into the reins.

She seized him by his tunic and hauled him up across her thighs into the saddle.

"Let up on the --ooof!" Amel broke off as the horse stomped down on both forelegs, forcing him to clutch at the rider or fall off. Vretla chucked the reins over the horse's head.

Dela was sure that was not, quite, what Amel meant by "let up".

The horse stumbled on a rein, swerved, and plunged straight toward Dela's window. Dela froze. Ril dragged her back. In the saddle, Vretla drew her sword. The horse tried to turn. The sword swung into the wall of glass and behind it bodies hurtled through an explosion of shards.

The turning horse smashed into the big window and fell over the razor toothed sill like so much thrashing meat, landing gashed. The spray of fragments came to Dela's feet. Beside her, Lady Ril clutched her arm.

Vretla got to her feet shedding broken glass. Her flight suit had spared her any bad cuts, although blood trickled, under high pressure, from a nick on one cheek. She took a step toward where Amel lay, still balled up to minimize body contact, but stopped as she saw him stir and heard him groan. The horse struggled to rise, and failed, blowing out noisily.

Vretla retrieved her sword. After breaking the window, she had thrown the weapon clear of her fall. To have such presence of mind under the circumstances was astonishing to Dela. Particularly in a woman. Vretla noticed Dela and Ril, as well, and muttered, "Demish skirts."

It did not sound like a compliment, but Dela was beyond taking offense. She stood like a statue of flesh clinging to Lady Ril.

The horse tried to rise again. It's plight made Dela's eyes tingle with threatened tears.

Vretla sheathed her sword to help Amel get up, a red film lubricating her grip.

"Break something Demish?" she asked him cheerfully, briskly checking for that, and any serious cuts.

He stumbled back, looking past her to the horse. He felt, Dela was certain, much as she did.

"Amel?" The Vrellish woman seemed confused now.

Amel shuffled through broken glass towards the wounded animal.

"Amel!" Vretla caught him by the arm and spun him around.

His eyes glistened with unshed tears.

"Why did you throw down the reins?" He demanded, speaking up to Vretla pol-to-rel.

That was impossible. There was no rank higher than Pureblood. Unless he was not Amel after all. But the woman had called him Amel.

"You said 'let go' ," Vretla contradicted his grammar by speaking up herself. One of them had to be wrong.

"I said 'let up'," Amel insisted, clearing up the pronoun problem by falling into line with Vretla's one-up address to him. He was Pureblood. That made Vretla a Royalblood, like Dela. But Vretla was no Demish princess. She was -- something else.

Vretla narrowed her dark eyes. "Just because you are as Demish as I am Vrellish does not mean that you are always right about everything to do with words."

Page last updated: 05-Dec-2003

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