Wardancers

The wardancer kindreds belong to Loec, the trickster: the god who dances, and who taught the elves that death is a joke that can, with sufficient art, be told back. They travel between the glades in wandering troupes, barefoot and inked with the tales they perform, and at the great fires they dance the old myths for the assembled kindreds. Every leap and blade-pass is a line of scripture; the swords are part of the telling.

In battle the performance simply continues with a less willing cast. Wardancers wear no armour, trusting to Loec's favour and to a speed that makes armour seem a confession of doubt. They pour through shield-walls like water through a fence, the troupe flowing from figure to figure (now a leaping storm of blades, now a slow circling wheel), each pattern of the dance an answer to a different kind of death. What enemies remember afterward is the laughter. It is not cruelty, or not only cruelty: the battle is the performance, the dance is a prayer, and the laughter means the dancers have reached the part of the story where death, once again, is fooled.