“I should have killed him, Verdandi,” Sabit said as she thrust her spear forward into the empty air. “I should have opened his throat and watched his blood trace crimson curves along the blade!”
The older woman chewed on a spicy curl of cinnamon bark. “If you say you should have, then you should have. Why didn’t you?” She watched Sabit continue her strenuous spear-dance—the bandit queen striking, spearing, dodging, and kicking a dozen imagined foes in her training exercise.
“He begged for mercy right there in the midst of the entire tribe. If I am to show these outcasts a better way, I must be better than their wicked old king,” Sabit replied. She punctuated the comment with an emphatic grunt as she thrust her spear deep into the gut of an imagined foe.
Verdandi nodded slowly a bemused look on her face. “Be that as it may. Showing the young folk a better path is a worthy goal indeed. If that were all that stayed your hand, I do not know what troubles you know, Sabit. Surely it cannot have anything to do with his claims of knowing you in the past …”
Sabit whirled on the old woman, her spear whistling through the air to point at Verdandi’s nose. “My past is dead and gone. It cannot harm me. My only concern is the future of this tribe and these villagers. I have much work to do before the king’s soldiers arrive.”
Turning on her heel, Sabit strode off in sullen silence, toward a future unmoored from the past.
———
Wayfarings of Sabit: Betrayal is copyright (c) 2017 by Michael S. Miller. All rights reserved. New chapters post on Monday and Thursday. You can support this and other stories on Patreon, https://patreon.com/michaelsmiller, or at http://ipressgames.com/fiction/.