Honor War

I want to say thank you to the College of Lyonsmarche for a wonderful event this last weekend. I would also like to thank the fine fencers there for allowing me to use my curved blades in the fighting.

The wonderful thing about out of kingdom events (especially when you're the only one from your kingdom) is that you don't have to worry about anything. You're not a threat. Since you're a foreigner, the other fencers aren't going to spend all of their time sizing you up and trying to tear apart your style so they can defeat you at the next tournament. What they are going to do (especially if you have any sort of scarf or are fighting with some oddball weapon) is try you out. This makes for a wonderful chance for you to fight against brand new, skilled fighters. And I discovered that, in An Tir, a Gold Scarf means you're a former kingdom champion. Which pretty much guaranteed that they were giving me their best fights.

It was wonderful. I spent at least three hours doing pick-ups, working with my short curved against a myriad of skill levels and styles. And I discovered something: my short curved was the equal of any long blade out there. Okay, maybe not the equal. It took some work to get inside their range, but I was able to do it. And I was able to do it in a way that I didn't have to worry about anyone figuring out my moves before the next tourney.

And that was before the tourney or the melees. I switched back to case for the tourney, so I didn't really learn too much, but when it came time for the melees, I switched back to short and dagger and that was a learning experience.

Boy was it. For starters, if you're in a battle that's eight guns to two, you want to be on the side with eight. The other thing was that my short is a lousy primary for open field battles, but it works pretty darn well in keep battles. The last thing I learned was that An Tiran fencers really aren't very good a melees. My guess is that they focus more on the tourney side of things.

All in all, it was a wonderful event. And, with a showing in the tourney of somewhere between 17 wins, 8 losses and 20 wins, 5 losses (with a 26-person round robin, it's kind of hard to keep track), I think I did our kingdom proud.