The obese wrestler rubbed a pudgy hand over his newest bruise, trying to ignore the growing taunts of his colleagues.
"I have been too relaxed against you," he said to the young woman, "my being thrice your weight and you being a girl."
Danica brushed her hair out of her almond-shaped brown eyes and tried to hide her smile. She didn't want to humiliate the proud cleric, a disciple of Oghma. She knew his boasts were ridiculous. He had fought with all his fury, but it hadn't done him any good.
Danica looked like a wisp of a thing, barely five feet tall, with a floppy mop of curly strawberry-blond hair hanging just below her shoulders and a smile to steal a paladin's heart. Those who looked more closely found much more than "girlish" dressing, though. Years of meditation and training had honed Danica's reflexes and muscles to a fine fighting edge, as the clerics of Oghma, fancying themselves great wrestlers in the image of their god figure, were painfully discovering one after another.
Every time Danica needed information in the great Edificant Library, she found it offered only in exchange for a wrestling match. For the gain of a single scroll penned by a long-dead monk, Danica now found herself faced off against this latest adversary, a sweaty and smelly behemoth. She didn't really mind the play; she knew she could defeat tins one as easily as she had dispatched all the others.
The fat man straightened his black-and-gold vest, lowered his round head, and charged.
Danica waited until he was right in front of her, and to the onlookers it looked as if the woman would be buried beneath mounds of flesh. At the last moment, she dipped her head under the fat man's lunging arm, caught his hand, and casually stepped behind him as he lumbered past. A subtle twist of her wrist stopped him dead in his tracks and, before he even realized what was happening, Danica kicked the back of both his knees, dropping him to a kneel.
While the big man went down, his arm, bent backward and held firmly in Danica's amazingly strong grasp, did not. Sympathetic groans and derisive laughter erupted from those gathered to watch.
"Eastern comer!" the big man cried. "Third row, third shelf from the top in a silver tube!"
"My thanks," Danica said, releasing her hold. She looked around, flashing that innocent smile.
"Perhaps the next time I require information, you can fight me two against one."
The clerics of Oghma, fearing that their god was not pleased, grumbled and turned away.
Danica offered her hand to the downed priest, but he proudly refused. He struggled to his feet, nearly falling again for lack of breath, and rushed to catch up with the others. Danica shook her head helplessly and retrieved her two daggers from a nearby bench. She took a moment to examine them, as she always did before putting them back into their respective boot sheaths. One had a hilt of gold, twisted into a tiger's head, while the other had one of silver, bearing an image of a dragon. Both sported transparent crystal blades and were enhanced by a wizard's spell to give them the strength of steel and perfect balance. They had been a very valuable and treasured gift from Danica's master, a man whom Danica dearly missed. She had been with Master Turkel since her parents had died, and the wizened old man had become all the family she had. Danica thought of him as she resheathed the weapons, vowing for the millionth time to visit him when she had completed her studies.
Danica Maupoissant had been raised amid the bustle of the Westgate marketplace, five hundred miles to the northeast of the Edificant Library, on the neck between the Lake of Dragons and the Sea of Fallen Stars. Her father, Pavel, was a craftsman, reputably the finest wagonmaker in the region, who, like many people of Westgate, possessed a stubborn and fierce independence and no small amount of pride.
Theirs was a life of simple pleasures and unconditional love. Danica was twelve when she left her parents to serve as an apprentice to the aged, white-bearded potter named Turkel Bastan. Only months later did Danica come to understand her parents' reasoning in sending her to him: they had foreseen what was to come.
She spent a year shuffling back and forth across the city, splitting her time between her extensive duties with Master Turkel and those rare opportunities she found to go home. Then, suddenly, there was nowhere to go. The raid had come in the dark of night, and when the assassins had gone, so, too, were Danica's parents, the house she had grown up in, and the wagon shop that had been her father's lifelong toil.
Master Turkel showed little emotion when he told Danica the terrible news, but the young girl heard him crying later, in the solitude of his small room. Only then did Danica come to realize that Turkel and her parents had orchestrated her apprenticeship. She had assumed it an accidental thing, and had feared that perhaps her parents had simply shuffled her away for their own convenience. She knew that Turkel was from the far-off eastern land of Tabot, the mountainous region of some of her mother's ancestors, and she wondered if Turkel might be a distant relative.
Whatever their relationship, Danica's apprenticeship with the master soon had taken on a different light. He had helped her through her grieving, then had begun her true instruction, lessons that had little to do with making pottery.
Turkel was a Tabotan monk, a disciple of Grandmaster Penpahg D'Ahn, whose religion combined mental discipline with physical training to achieve harmony of the soul. Danica guessed Turkel to be no less than eighty years old, but he could move with the grace of a hunting cat and strike with his bare hands with the force of iron weapons. His displays more than amazed Danica; they consumed her. Quiet and unassuming, Turkel was as peaceful and contented a man as Danica had ever known, yet underneath that outward guise was a fighting tiger that could be brought roaring forth in times of need.
So, too, grew the tiger in Danica. She learned and practiced, nothing else mattered to her. She used her constant work as a litany against her memories, a barricade against the pain with which she could not yet come to terms. Turkel understood, Danica later realized, and he chose carefully when he would tell her more of her parents' demise.
The craftsmen and merchants of Westgate, along with, or perhaps because of, their fierce independence, were often bitter rivals, and Pavel had not escaped this fact of Westgate life.
There were several other wagonmakers- Turkel would not tell Danica their names-who were jealous of Pavel's continuing prosperity. They went to Pavel on a few occasions, threatening him with severe consequences if he would not share with them his long backlog of orders.
"If they had come as friends and fellow craftsmen, Pavel would have shared the wealth," Turkel had said, as though he and Danica's father had been much more than the slight acquaintances they pretended to be in public. "But your father was a proud man. He would not give in to threats, no matter how real the danger behind them."
Danica had never pressed Turkel for the identity of the men who had killed her parents-or, rather, had hired the dreaded Night Masks, the usual means of assassination in Westgate, and to this day, she did not know who they were. She trusted that the master would tell her when he felt she was prepared to know, prepared to take revenge, if that was her choice, or when he believed she was willing to let go of the past and build on the future. Turkel had always indicated that to be his preference.
The image of the aged master came clearly to Danica's mind as she stood there, holding the magnificent daggers. "You have outgrown me," he had said to her, and there was no remorse, only pride, in his tone. "Your skills surpass my own in so many areas."
Danica remembered vividly that she had thought the time of revelation at hand, that Turkel would tell her the names of the conspirators who had killed her parents and tell her to go out and seek revenge.
Turkel had other ideas.
"There remains only one master who can continue to instruct you," Turkel had said, and as soon as he mentioned the Edificant Library, Danica knew what was to come. The library was home to many of Grandmaster Penpahg D'Ahn's rare and priceless scrolls; Turkel wanted her to learn directly from the records of the long-dead grandmaster. It was then that Turkel had given her the two magnificent daggers.
So she had left Westgate, barely more than a child, to build on her future, to attain new heights of self-discipline. Once again Master Turkel had shown his love and respect for her, placing her needs above his own obvious despair at her departure.
Danica believed that she had accomplished much in her first year at the library, both in her studies and in her understanding of other people, of the world that suddenly seemed so very large.
She thought it ironic that her education of the wide world would come in a place of almost monastic seclusion, but she couldn't deny that her views had matured considerably in the year she had spent at the library. Before she had lived in the private desire for revenge; now Westgate and the hired assassins seemed so very far away, and so many other, more positive, opportunities were opened to her.