Eclipse Three

The Pretenders' Tourney by Daniel Abraham

The serfs and peasants of Castrwick said a star had fallen from Heaven. Or an angel. The night had gone bright as an instant of noon. The thunder of it left the church bells chiming as if they'd been struck. A plague-blinded baby regained her sight by being bathed in that divine light, so they said.

Now, only a light rain fell, dotting the heather with silver. A dozen local men, their caps in their hands, stood around the three nobles who had come from Westford Keep: Dafyd's mother, the newly widowed Dowager Duchess; his childhood friend Rosmund Colp, fourth son of Lord Andigent and now family priest of Westford; and Dafyd himself, once the youngest son of Westford, and now by grace of God its Duke.

"It might be miraculous," Rosmund said.

The wound in the land gaped wider than a man's height and three times as long. The stone itself rested on a rough pallet of cut saplings.

"Of course it is," Dafyd's mother said. "It fell from Heaven as a sign from God."

Rosmund looked at his knees, his wide brow taking on the furrows they always did when the Duchess started declaiming upon the Divine.

Dafyd dropped to the ground and walked closer. The village men, once his father's property and now his own, stepped aside to let him pass. Their gazes never rose above his knee and none of them spoke, but something in the way they held themselves crackled with excitement. Dafyd had seen boys no more than ten stand the same way just before a children's melee, but these were men. Gray-haired, some of them. It struck him again that he was the youngest person present.

Black as soot, the stone was shapeless as a blighted apple. The word of God made stone: twisted, diseased, ambiguous.

"It's good iron, that," one of the men behind him said.

Dafyd turned to him. A broad-shouldered man, missing his lower teeth, his hands were knobbed with muscle and his arms were both wider than the young man's thigh. He could have broken Dafyd over his knee like a twig, but instead he blushed under his gaze and looked ashamed for having spoken. Dafyd tried to recall the man's name. Herdlick, he thought. Or that might have been the smith at the next village on. His father would have known.

"If you please, sir," he said toward Dafyd's feet.

"We shall have a new blade forged," the Duchess said. Her eyes were bright as candles. "A new blade for a new age."

The subtle sound came, barely audible over the tapping of raindrops, of a dozen men taking in a breath at once. Nothing, Dafyd thought, suited his mother as well as theater, and the weight of her drama settled across his shoulders like a yoke. Anger crawled up his throat, and he spoke more sharply than he intended to.

"There isn't time. We leave for court in a fortnight."

"It will be done, my lord," the smith who might have been Herdlick said. His face was round as the moon and as bright. "I ain't a swordsmith by trade. That was Ableson, and him plague-took. But I know as much as anyone in the Duchy and, by my honor, my lord, if I have to kill myself and both my 'prentices doing it, it'll be in your hand when that day comes."

That day. The words nipped Dafyd's belly like bad meat.

"It is the will of God," his mother said. Dafyd stepped back to his horse, heaved himself up into the saddle, and pulled her head back toward the path more roughly than she deserved. He felt an instant stab of regret.

Rosmund and his slow nag caught up with Dafyd before the first turning. They rode for half a mile in silence. The rain grew harder, the low gray sky more nearly the color of steel.

"I'm not sure running off helps," Rosmund said.

"I'm not running," Dafyd said. "And a fat lot of good you were."

"What did you want me to say? That stones fall from the sky all the time?"

"You could have said that being odd doesn't make something holy. Or that it was an omen that I shouldn't be king," Dafyd said. "The best you could offer was it might be miraculous?"

"Well, it might."

"Or?"

Rosmund shrugged. The rain had plastered his hair to his skull. He looked like a drowned cat.

"Or it might not," he said. "But that's not the question. Is it?"

The plague had come in late summer, seven weeks before the harvest. It began as a cough, and then a fever. Those who fell before it took to their beds. Two days after the first cough, the fever began to rise and fall, and the ill lost their minds. Many were tormented by dreams of demons lurking in the shadows. Some were possessed by lust.

At five days, their joints swelled and ached. At six, some respite came; lucidity returned, joints moved more freely, fever cooled. On the seventh day, just as the power of the illness seemed broken, they died. A glimmer of hope before the grave, a small added cruelty that made mere tragedy into something worse. Dafyd's infant sister had even taken milk once-the first in days-before her tiny lips stilled.

Some villages lost only one or two people. Others were killed to the last man. Plague-death struck where it struck and passed over the houses it passed with a will of its own.

It took the Duke of Westford, silencing his cool wit and ending forever his warm embraces and drunken midwinter songs. It took Dafyd's sister, Ydel, before she could walk or speak; her toothless grin gone still. It took his eldest brother, fair-eyed Racian, who Dafyd had grown up believing to be invincible. It took his older brother, Caersin, from his library at seminary. It took the family tutor, the dancing master, and twenty servants.

It spared the Duchess, though the grief released a religious fervor that had survived through twenty-five years of marriage to the Duke. Dafyd suffered no cough, no fever, no delirium or swollen hands.

How much of him had survived was an open question.

Riding back now, Rosmund at his side, the lethal season they had left behind showed in small ways. Here a field lay fallow, all the hands that worked it the year before now lying beneath it. There, a dyer's yard with windows stopped up with wooden planks and jute to keep out snow long since melted. The smiles and bows offered by the men and women they passed showed ghosts behind the eyes. No one was untouched.

Both of the princes had also died, and the king's brother, Lord Saratyn. They said the king died at midnight on the longest night of the year, but that seemed too poetic to be true. Even as the plague went on its deadly way, the Council Regent studied the genealogies and precedents, argued points of law and cited examples of succession. At the first thaw, they agreed that the impasse could not be settled by mortal means.

The debate hinged on whether the ascendance of King Abdemar of Essen three hundred years before had been legitimate or not, and reasonable men could have different opinions on the subject. If it had been, then, by its precedent, Sir Ursin Palliot, Duke of Lakefell and Warden of the South, was the royal cousin set to inherit the throne.

If it had not, then Westford ascended, and by the grace of the God who had slaughtered his family, Dafyd Laician would become king.

And God, so the Council Regent said, was to answer the question in His traditional manner: trial by combat. Whose arm He lent strength would be king.

"It isn't as simplistic as you make it sound," Rosmund said.

"No?" Dafyd asked.

"Of course not."

In the privacy of the Ducal stead, a dry cassock and his hair only damp and both Duchess and laity safely distant, Rosmund looked more like a priest. The fire burning in the grate pushed back the spring chill and filled the room with the smell of pine sap and smoke, driving out the scent of rain. Rosmund poured himself another cup of wine as he spoke.

"There are also political considerations. Lord Palliot is willing to set aside the cane field grants that Earl Haver wants, and so Haver is against you. Our former King, God keep him, had fallen three years behind in paying tithes. The bishop knows you and I are on good terms, and suddenly he's moved to write an opinion that the Essen ascension was based on scriptural misreading."

"Money and ambition, then. I don't find that comforting."

Rosmund drank the wine, his throat working with each swallow. The cup clicked against the table.

"I think you're underestimating the comfort money and ambition can bring," he said contemplatively, and the door behind him burst open.

"You are never," the Duchess said, storming into the room, "never to disgrace this family that way again."

The words struck her son like a slap.

"Disgrace?" Dafyd said, rising to his feet. "You spout the will of God like a zealot! Fine. But don't pretend that I have to carry it."

Her cheeks were red and thick, her lips almost blue, and her hands balled in fists. Rosmund poured himself a fresh cup of wine as they shouted.

"You run off like a little boy whenever you're… "

"Like it or not, Mother, I am Duke of Westford now, and if you… "

"… faced with the reality of God's presence. Well it… "

"… feel that you've become a prophet of God… "

"… might have been charming when you were a child, but… "

"… you can tell Him that I have no use for… "

Rosmund made a slurping sound. They both wheeled on him, chests working like bellows. He looked up at them, wide-eyed.

"Sorry," he said.

"Dafyd," the Duchess said, her voice quieter now, but sharp. "Every man in that field was looking to you, and you disappointed them. And me. And your father. Never do it again."

She wheeled before he could answer and swept from the room, slamming the door behind her. Dafyd said something obscene. Rosmund shrugged, refusing even in her absence, to cross the woman.

"Hypocrite," Dafyd said, accusing the closed door she'd passed through. "Says I'm acting like a child the same breath that I'm to do exactly what my mother tells me? She will never listen."

"Well. When you're king, maybe," Rosmund said.

Dafyd threw a cup at his head.

The journey to Cyninghalm could have been no more than a dozen days, but the weight of ceremony and allegiance slowed them to a crawl. The wide road, centuries old and still as solid as the day the stones were set, filled around their carts and carriages. Knights on huge warhorses waited at every crossroads, ready to join their banners to Westford's own. High lords and low fell in behind them wearing enameled armor so light and gaudy Dafyd couldn't help but think of beetles. As they passed, the trees themselves seemed to bow to them.

To him.

And with every league he traveled, his own robes and the black-and-silver of his court armor seemed more ridiculous. With every night's camp spent presiding over the grand pavilion, with every beery, weeping man laced into his best tournament silk, Dafyd felt more a pretender.

"He was a great man, your da," the Earl of Anmuth said. "A great man."

"Thank you," Dafyd said.

The old man bent back his head, gold beard shot with gray pointing toward the moon. Tears ran from his rheumy eyes, and his voice was thick with phlegm and sorrow.

"I was there the day he bested Easin's three top fighters. You wouldn't have been born then, but God, it was a day. Your da, he was brilliant. And after, when he took us all aside and swore that we… that we… "

He sobbed. The others-there must have been a dozen men in the pavilion, even that late-watched as if Dafyd were the entertainment. He set his jaw and prayed the old idiot would pass out. Anmuth wiped his eyes with the back of one wide, meaty hand, then leaned close. His breath smelled like the wind from a brewery.

"Lord Bessin came to me," he said softly. "Ass-licker offered to make me Warden of Rivers if I threw in with Palliot. Told him I'd rather muck stables. And I would, too. I would."

Dafyd nodded solemnly. The old man's bleary gaze locked on his, waiting for Dafyd to speak. He didn't know what he was expected to say. Thank you or I will be avenged.

"My father would appreciate that," he said. "He always counted you among his most trusted friends."

It might have been true, for all Dafyd could say. It sounded kind enough. New tears welled up in Anmuth's eyes and spilled down his cheeks. His beard squeezed together, completely obscuring his lips. He nodded once, clapped Dafyd on the shoulder, and walked unsteadily away.

Dafyd waited, troubled by something he couldn't quite express. The moon made its slow arc across the dark sky. Musicians played on flute and tambour. A minstrel declaimed the story of King Almad and the Dragon, which Dafyd had sat through unmoved a thousand times before. But when King Almad ascended to Heaven this time, he felt his throat thickening and his eyes tearing up. His brothers would have laughed.

And through it all, something Anmuth said bothered him like a stone in his boot. It wasn't until he lay down to sleep that he knew what it was.

Rosmund's tent wasn't quite as overbuilt as his own, but it still had its own framed door and walls too thick for sound to pass through easily. Dafyd shook the priest's door servant-a thin-framed boy in a cheap, greasy cassock-awake, and waited no more than a minute before Rosmund opened the door and waved him in. Rosmund wore a thick cotton night dress unlaced down the front, and his hair stood at a hundred different angles.

"Long time since we kept a midnight meeting," he said, and yawned. "We would have been twelve, I think."

"Are we alone?"

His bleary eyes sharpened.

"No," he said, "but she's well asleep, and I'd rather not wake her."

"Be sure," Dafyd said.

Rosmund went through the thick leather flap of the tent's interior wall and door. The Duke sat on a tapestried cushion until the priest came back.

"Snoring deeply," Rosmund said. "What's the matter?"

"Why is Lord Bessin trying to get men to side with Palliot?" Dafyd asked. "Trial by arms isn't about who's cheering or where they sit."

Rosmund shrugged and waited for Dafyd to tell him. They had known one another too long.

"Allies don't help in single combat," Dafyd said. "They're very useful in a war. I don't think my lord the Duke is going to accept a loss."

Rosmund's eyebrows rose toward his hairline. He whistled low, soft and appreciative.

"Insurrection. That would be a very, very stupid thing to do."

"You think I'm wrong then?"

"No," he said. "I think grief drives people mad, and anything, no matter how ill-advised, becomes possible."

"Grief?"

"Look around. The kingdom's caught a fever, and it's touched everyone. Not just you."

A soft wind shook the thick leather walls. The candle flickered and the woman in the next room murmured something inchoate.

"I'm not at issue here. We're talking about civil war," Dafyd said, his voice cool.

"We're talking about mastering a world that's just shown everyone that it will take everything from them anytime it wishes," Rosmund said, his voice growing deep and passionate in a way it rarely did when speaking at the pulpit.

"I don't… " Dafyd began, but Rosmund talked over him.

"Your mother's turned to piety and prayer. Bessin and Palliot have turned to intrigue. I've turned to sex. Back to sex. These are different dressings on the same wound. The plague reminded us that we're powerless, and now we're trying to forget."

"This isn't about the plague," Dafyd said.

"Of course it is."

"It's not!"

Rosmund looked down, lips pressed tight.

"I didn't come here to talk about the plague or God or the wounds of the kingdom," Dafyd said, venom in his voice. "I came because I thought of all the men I know, I could tell my suspicions to you. That you would listen."

They were silent for a moment.

"And didn't I?" Rosmund asked.

A woman's voice came, slushy and warm and dazed.

"Love? Did something happen?"

"Nothing, sweet thing," Rosmund said. "It's nothing. A bad dream."

Dafyd gathered himself to leave, but Rosmund put a hand on his arm. His touch was gentle and familiar, and Dafyd had to force himself not to push it away.

"You weren't like this before the plague," Rosmund said.

"Like what?"

"Angry. Afraid," he said. And then, "You didn't whine as much."

Sleep didn't come easily. In the privacy of his imagination, Dafyd told Rosmund exactly why the priest was an idiot. He dressed down his mother and her overbearing piety. He confronted Lord Bessin and Duke Palliot. His words unanswerable and his logic profound, his opponents abased themselves before him. The rage that kept the Duke from rest didn't cool.

He lay in the darkness of his bed until the quiet murmurs of the guards changed and the first, tentative songs that the birds sang before first light began. He would have said sleep had never come had a rough voice not wakened him.

"The Duchess sent for you. It's here, my lord," the servant said.

The Duke sat up, field bed creaking under him. His eyes felt too large for their sockets, and more than his weight pulled him back toward the bed.

"What's come?"

The pause lasted less than a heartbeat. The answer came with barely hidden awe.

"The blade," the servant said.

A chill mist clung to the ground. The Duchess, wearing a high-collared black dress with a thin silver chain around her neck, stood waiting in the camp's main yard. Beside her, the blacksmith knelt. He looked sick with fatigue; pale skin, bloodshot eyes, and a looseness in his spine that left Dafyd afraid the man would collapse on the spot. Westford's men and allies stood arrayed behind them in an eerie silence. He didn't see Rosmund anywhere. As he walked toward the assembly, it occurred to him exactly how he would look; mist at his ankles, the risen sun shining off his face. It couldn't have been better staged if it had been a theater piece.

With a visible effort, the blacksmith pulled himself straight and held out a sheathed blade.

"Damn near killed us, my lord," he said. "But we got it done."

Dafyd felt a moment's sympathy for the man and his apprentices. The smith had truly done himself damage, and he at least believed it was for the Duke. The Duchess might have smiled, or Dafyd might only have imagined it. He couldn't answer the smith's loyalty to Dafyd's father with rudeness again. The Duchess had known he couldn't.

Dafyd nodded gravely and took the scabbard. There were tears in the smith's eyes. His huge hands shook. Dafyd drew the sword. The best blades sing when they pull free. This one didn't. Dafyd tapped the fresh metal against its scabbard, and it clanked like a metal stick. There was no groove down the center. When he pressed against the flat, it barely flexed at all. The edge was sharp enough, but the blade was ill-balanced and brittle. He had seen boys at play with better.

In deep, stark letters, the smith had engraved God's Will into the blade.

"Westford!" someone cried. "Westford and Honor! Westford and God!"

The men took up the call, pumping their fists and shouting at the morning sun. Dafyd looked at his mystical and blessed blade, hardly better than pot metal. With this he was supposed to win the crown. With this, they wanted him to best Palliot and then most likely lead them into civil war. With this, they wanted him to heal the kingdom. To avenge his father against God. To make all wrong things right.

They might as well have asked him to put his heels against the sky and lift the world.

The first time Dafyd had gone to court, he was just past his seventh birthday. Cyninghalm had been a name to conjure with: the high court, foundation of the kingdom, center of the world. For weeks before, he had dreamed of silvered spires and vast, exotic gardens. The truth was grayer and squat. The great men and women of the court turned out to be much like the people in Westford, but less impressed by his father's status. While grand, and some truly beautiful, no buildings matched the stories he'd conjured about them. Likely nothing could.

This time, he saw graves.

They began five miles from the city walls, the freshest first. Wide fields with headstones like rough, demonic teeth. Turned earth as long as a man or a woman or, more often, a child. With each mile, the graves themselves showed their age by the height of the grass upon them. By the time he saw the rising hill and the city upon it glowing in the afternoon sun, he had left the evidence of the winter's plague behind.

Still, he didn't know how deeply the honor guard of the dead had shaken him until his company passed through the city gates to the flowers and gaudy cloth of the tourney festival. The local folk thronged the streets; they shouted and smiled and sang the praises of God and Westford. He knew they had done the same for Palliot three days before. The new and rightful king had come to Cyninghalm, and only a few people seemed uneasy not to know when precisely it had happened.

Dafyd watched their faces as they passed. Ruddy, laughing, sometimes grinning through tears. The crowds followed him from the city gates, up three hills, to the inner wall, and then to the palace itself. Men and women he didn't know, had never seen, shouting and waving and begging that he should bless them. Dafyd washed through the city on a flood of something that another man at another time might have mistaken for love. Rosmund had known its real name. It might have worn its particolored clothes, but grief was still grief.

The tourney itself had begun a week before; jousts and melees, archery and axe throwing, song and strife and games of honor. A minor knight with third-hand armor stunned the court by beating Sir Laren Esterbrand. Corriot Mander of Evenhall had worn a token from another man's wife into the melee. Sir Ander Anson's lance had shattered in his first tilt on the jousting grounds, and a splinter of it had pierced his leg; the funeral would come tomorrow. Between the ceremonies of welcome and the press of court followers anxious to ingratiate themselves to the Duke of Westford and claimant to the throne, it was after nightfall before Dafyd went hunting Lord Bessin.

Trials by combat were held at the court within the court, a great hall with tiered benches six deep around a tile-marked square in the central floor and a ceiling so dark and high that, in the torchlight, it might have been the sky. Two men in light chain with blunt swords grunted and shoved in the square. Perhaps a hundred men watched and called out encouragement or derision. Bessin sat alone at the lowest tier, near to the combatants.

A smaller man than Dafyd remembered, Bessin was gray at the temples with a sharp beard and bright, foxlike eyes. A tip of pink tongue wetted his lips and he sat forward, leaning in toward the spectacle.

"A word, my lord?" Dafyd said.

Bessin's smile didn't falter. No hint of unease touched his eyes. It was enough to make Dafyd wonder if he had been wrong. On the court, the smaller knight disengaged, backing perilously close to the border mark.

"Westford," Bessin said. "I heard you'd come. I trust the journey wasn't too arduous."

"Weather was good," Dafyd said, sitting beside him. "Too much company, though. I travel better light."

Lord Bessin made a companionable sound in his throat. The larger knight swung a few low, testing blows. The smaller opponent tried to dodge around to the relative safety of the center. His face, toward Dafyd, was flushed and sweat-soaked and chagrined.

"I need to talk to him," Dafyd said. "Now. Before the trial."

Bessin forgot the battle on the floor and turned his attention to Dafyd. The polite veneer gone, suspicion took its place.

"I don't know who you mean," Bessin said.

"Yes, you do. Everyone knows you're running his errands. You can stop it now. Just tell him that a private word with me will make his life easier."

The larger knight made his move. Roaring like a bear, he charged. The smaller man raised his shield, only to have it batted away. The two armored bodies came together with a crash. The crowd rose to its feet around Dafyd and Bessin as the smaller knight bent slowly backward, heels just inside of the border mark and struggling not to take a single step back. Even as close as they sat, the howl of voices almost drowned out Bessin's words. The two of them might have been alone.

"Without an assurance of his safety," Bessin said carefully, "my lord Palliot would be a fool to be in private with his rival for the throne."

"If I wanted to assassinate him, I wouldn't come to his known ally and ask for an audience."

"No?" Bessin said. "And how would you assassinate Lord Palliot?"

The smaller knight grunted, screamed, and dropped twisting to his knees. Suddenly off-balance, the larger opponent windmilled his arms and stumbled forward. His foot passed the border mark, and the smaller man leaped up, mailed fists raised in victory. The crowd erupted in cheers and derision.

"I'll provide a hostage," Dafyd said. "Tell Palliot to come to the winter garden at moonset. He can bring as many men as he likes, but tell him to bring only the ones he trusts."

Dafyd walked away before Bessin could respond. His heart raced and his hands shook.

He found Rosmund in a fire circle, clapping and singing along as women in too little clothing danced through the flames. Dafyd put his hand on the priest's shoulder.

"I need a favor," he whispered. Rosmund lost the beat, then stopped clapping.

"What's the matter?"

"I need a favor," Dafyd said again.

Rosmund broke away from the circle and followed him into darkness without word or question, and Dafyd loved him for it.

The winter garden spread out at the southern edge of the palace, wide paths of stone and gravel winding through low hedge and dwarf trees all within webwork walls of glass and iron. Dafyd's father had said the king could grow iris and rose in it all year round, but there were no blooms now. The still air smelled of rotting plants and soil. The two sat on a low stone bench lit by a single candle as the crescent moon slipped below the distant, dark horizon. The pale flicker of lamp light came from a darkened arch, growing steadily brighter. Bessin and five men in the colors of his house approached.

The Duke stood.

"This is the hostage?" Bessin asked.

"Apparently so," Rosmund said.

"If you will join us, father," Bessin said.

Rosmund stood, took a long, deep breath, and met Dafyd's gaze with an expression both skeptical and determined.

"It'll be fine," Dafyd said.

"I'm reassured."

Bessin, Rosmund, and the men at arms walked away together, vanishing under the archway. Dafyd didn't sit. A moment later, Palliot appeared with three swordsmen behind him. The guards stopped short; Palliot came on, his steps slow and wary. He was a tall man, broad across the shoulder. His jaw ran toward jowls though he wasn't more than three years older than Dafyd. His fair hair was pulled back and his dark eyes shifted through the darkness.

"Duke Palliot."

"Westford," he replied with a small but formal bow. "You wanted words."

"Yes," Dafyd said, then took a deep breath. "The kingdom's in pain. It needs a king strong enough to hold it together while the wounds knit."

"It does," Palliot said, as if answering an accusation.

"You should do it."

Palliot crossed his arms, head cocked as if he'd heard an unfamiliar sound.

"You're forfeiting the trial?"

"Not that. I can't. There are too many people who back me for my father's sake," Dafyd said. "If we don't go through with it, there'll be talk that your rule isn't legitimate. I can't forfeit. But I can lose."

"Lose," Palliot repeated.

"A few good blows for each of us for the sake of form. I'll come too near the border mark, and you'll knock me over it. I'll swear my fealty to you, and no one need ever doubt it was a fair fight."

"And in return you want… what?"

Dafyd laughed, surprised by the bitterness in the sound.

"The last year undone," he said. "I want the dead alive. I want the graves undug. I want God to say it was a mistake and that He takes it back. But failing that, I want it to be your problem and not mine."

Somewhere in the speech, tears had stolen into his eyes, and he wiped them away with a sleeve. Palliot was quiet for a long moment.

"You'd give up your honor? This trial isn't to the death."

"Yes, it is," he said. "If not on the court, then in the field. Let's not pretend otherwise."

The larger man laughed. Dafyd thought there was relief in it.

"You're wiser than I expected," Palliot said, his eyes still narrow and his voice cautious.

"We understand one another, then?" Dafyd said.

Palliot was silent for longer than Dafyd liked, the dark eyes searching the empty air before the man grunted.

"Will you swear to it before God?" Palliot asked.

It was all Dafyd could do not to laugh.

"If you'd like," he said. "I swear before God."

"Then I do as well," Palliot said, and held out his hand. Dafyd took it. Palliot had an impressive grip.

They stood together for a moment, and then Dafyd watched Palliot walk back to his men, head held high. Silently, they vanished into the shadows, leaving him to sit on the bench. Someone approached, gravel complaining at each footstep. And then a wet sound, and Rosmund said something obscene.

"You're well?" Dafyd asked as his friend sat beside him. Rosmund's right leg was caked to the ankle with a greenish muck.

"Ruined my hose," he said ruefully. "And you?"

"I said what I came to say."

"Well, I'm pleased they didn't kill me over it."

The single candle flickered, then stood straight again. The air wasn't particularly cold, but Dafyd was shivering.

"Rosmund, can I ask you something?"

"As a friend or a priest?"

"Priest."

"Anything you like, my child," he said, only half-mocking. Dafyd took a long, slow breath.

"Does God have a plan for us?"

"I assume so. Everyone seems to think He does."

"I believe God is evil," Dafyd said. It was the first time he had said the words aloud, and he felt the air itself clear when he said them.

"Is that why you're conspiring to lose the trial?" Rosmund asked, his voice as comfortable as if they'd been discussing nothing more than food or which girls were prettiest. "To take the decision away from Him?"

"I suppose so."

"It won't work. It can't. Whatever happens tomorrow will have been God's will," Rosmund said. "You win? God did it. Palliot? God will have done that too. You both fall down when you step on the court and stub your toes too badly to walk? Still God."

"I'll know," Dafyd said. "That's enough."

"What if ceding to Palliot was God's plan all along? How would you know?"

Dafyd growled, a small noise in the back of his throat. Rosmund didn't seem to hear it.

"It doesn't matter whether God is good or God is evil," the priest went on. "It doesn't even matter if God is God. As long as He's a tale told after the fact, He's inevitable. You can't beat Him."

"Watch me," Dafyd said.

"Listen to me. As a priest, I'm telling you the dice are shaved. The cards are marked. Good or evil or a fairy story grown fat on too many tellings, it doesn't matter. Even if there is no God, He will win."

Dafyd Laician, Duke of Westford, spent the following day in one of two equally placed couches overlooking the melee field. Grass still clung to the margins, but days of battles and games had reduced the center to mud. There were four combats planned: a children's melee at dawn, a battle of ten against ten with maces and flails, a great battle of twenty to a side in the early afternoon, and the generally comic infirm melee at evening where the wounded and spent of the previous days' games took the field in splints and bandages.

His mother had arranged to have the sword God's Will hung behind his chair and draped with cloth-of-gold. If she hadn't sat beside him the whole day through, he would have taken the thing down. Across the field, Palliot sat in a seat that mirrored his. For all the battles and entertainments, more eyes were on the pair of them than the field. Only when Sir Emund Loak, having survived the blow that caved in his armor, died when his breastplate's straps were cut did the drama of the day turn from the succession. And then only briefly.

Night came with a great feast. Some master of entertainments with an overactive sense of humor placed the high table crosswise from its usual orientation, with Palliot on one end and Dafyd at the other, the court etiquette fashion of asking which is the king?

Dafyd retired to his rooms early, claiming the need to rest and prepare for the next day's trial. Palliot did the same. There would be time enough for wine and song when the succession was decided.

A fire burned low in the grate, red coals casting dim shadows on the walls. The air stifled, and rather than call for a servant, Dafyd opened the window shutters himself and stood in the cool air, watching the stars in the sky and the lights of the palace wink at each other.

The door opened behind him, then shut.

"Will you pray with me?" the Duchess asked, her voice small. Almost fearful. She glowed red in the dim light. The thin line of her mouth and the severe knot of her hair made her an ascetic. He wondered what had happened to the woman with long, soft hair who had sung to him when he was a boy. He wondered what had happened to the boy.

"No," Dafyd said. And then, "I'm sorry. But no. I can't."

"I can pray for you," she said. She meant I will make it all right, and the sorrow in her eyes meant she knew she couldn't. They stood for a moment in silence, a gulf between them more painful than the one separating them from the dead. He was the first to look away.

"You have to kill him," she said. "If he gives you an opportunity during the trial, you must kill him. It will stop any chance of his leading an insurrection later."

"Is that what God tells you?" Dafyd said more harshly than he'd meant. He braced himself against her anger. She sighed faintly.

"It is what my experience says, and it is what I fear he is thinking of you. I wish that your father… " she began, then shook her head. "I love you, perfect child. Sleep well."

He wanted to turn to her, to call her back, but he loved her too well to do it. The door closed again, leaving him to himself.

When Dafyd had found Bessin, a hundred men or less had lounged on the tiered benches around the court within the court. Now there were thousands. The noise of voices could have drowned out a heavy surf. The air hung low and thick, stale as children hiding too long under a blanket.

Dafyd wore his best armor, black and silver scale and fit for a body slightly changed by the months since its making. His shield dragged at his left arm, and the new sword hung at his side in a scabbard of gems and silver like a milkmaid wearing silk. As he passed the benches, he saw a hundred faces that he knew. His father's men and allies. He saw the anxiety in their eyes, the hope and the fear. He was about to disappoint them all. It was the choice he'd made and he told himself the shame would be worth the relief.

The Duchess sat on the front bench in a dress whose cut owed as much to a nun's habit as to the glamour of court. Rosmund, behind her, wore his cassock and a grave expression.

What if ceding to Palliot was God's plan all along?

Across the court, Dafyd's opponent wore armor of enameled scales the blue of the sky; his shield bore a bronze sun. When their eyes met, Dafyd nodded. Palliot didn't return the gesture.

The high priest entered the court and raised his hands. His voice rang clear and pure and totally at odds with the pandemonium around him. As he chanted out a benediction, all heads bowed except Dafyd's. Even Palliot cast his gaze down. Dafyd felt singled out, even embarrassed, but his neck would not bend. The prayer echoed off the distant ceiling, giving the words a sense of depth and grandeur. He wondered whether the architects had designed the room just for moments like this.

When the high priest was done, the two combatants strapped on their helmets and stepped over the border mark together. There was no court official to remind them of the rules of combat, no priest to declare that God would strengthen the arm of the righteous. Everyone knew.

Dafyd drew his sword. Palliot did the same. They stepped to the center of the court to determine the fate of the kingdom and, Dafyd thought bitterly, through their violence, heal the world.

Palliot shifted to his right, swinging his blade low and slow, no more than the testing blow that any fight might begin with. Dafyd moved away rather than block with his shield, and countered with a half-hearted swing at Palliot's exposed arm. Palliot pulled back, moving carefully, his weight forward.

Dafyd's eyes were narrow, and he found his body reacting as if the fight were genuine. With a sudden roar, Palliot charged, his shield slamming against Dafyd and shoving him off balance. Dafyd bent low, and his enemy's blade skittered off the face of his shield.

Dafyd swung at Palliot's leg, turning the blade at the last moment to slap him with the flat of it. To the crowd, it would look like a missed chance; a cut tendon would have ended the issue, only not the way Dafyd had chosen.

Palliot danced back, his face flushed. He held his blade high behind him, as his father had taught. In a true battle, it would leave his opponent uncertain of which angle his attack might come from. Dafyd met the man's eyes, nodded, and swung a high overhand toward Palliot's skull. Palliot blocked with his shield. Dafyd's sword clanked, and the power of the blow made his fingers smart. The poor balance left his arm aching already.

Palliot pushed back, and Dafyd gave way, moving plausibly and unmistakably toward the border mark. Palliot shifted forward, bringing a heel down hard on Dafyd's foot. The sudden pain confused and surprised him, and he hesitated as Palliot got around his guard, pushing him back toward the center court like a sheep dog holding its flock.

Fear bloomed in Dafyd's breast, and he looked a question at his opponent. He might as well have asked it of stone. Palliot swung hard and fast; the edge of Dafyd's shield only pushed the blade aside from its target. He felt its point catch at his hip, and then a deeper pain. Leaping back, Dafyd saw a glimpse of red at the tip of Palliot's blade.

It is what my experience says, and it is what I fear he is thinking of you.

Dafyd felt a brief, shrill panic washing away grief and despair both. And then, a heartbeat later, his teeth ground against each other, his heart glowed with rage. He screamed wordlessly as he attacked.

Bent low, his shield forward, Dafyd pushed close, swinging hard, a blow more outrage than technique. Palliot blocked easily with his shield and struck back. He was hellishly strong. At the third blow, Dafyd's shield began to buckle, the metal cutting into the flesh of his arm. When he staggered back, Palliot loped around, cutting off the court's edge again.

There was glee in Palliot's face now. His dark eyes glittered, and the thin lips were pulled back into something between a smile and a threat. Dafyd's arm ached. His sword hand was nearly numb. He shouted again, pushed forward, and slammed Palliot with his breaking shield. Palliot fell back a step more from surprise than the attack itself, then roared and shifted again, keeping Dafyd from the border mark. Fight or die, Dafyd would not even be permitted surrender.

Palliot leaped forward with a high side swing. It felt like nothing more than a hard tap with a stick, and then it hurt much worse. Dafyd tried to fall back, but Palliot was on him. Fury or ecstasy fueled the man's arm, and he rained blows on Dafyd's shield and helmet, hammering him down. Dafyd cried out, his fear coming in sobs. His cut hip had been bleeding down his leg unnoticed until he slipped on the blood and fell to one knee.

Like a man swearing fealty, Dafyd knelt, a parody of the ending he hoped for. God's last joke. Palliot's eyes widened, enchanted by the image of his own victory. He lifted his blade, hewing down like an axeman splitting wood. Dafyd raised sword and shield together in a desperate block. Their blades met.

Dafyd felt his break.

Palliot staggered back, blood pouring down his face. A flap of pale skin open in his forehead showed where the flying sword point had slipped past the helmet's brim. Dafyd rose.

All through the court, men were on their feet, screaming and cheering like a storm wind.

Dafyd felt blood cooling on his leg. The pain in his side might have been burning or cold, but whichever it grew worse with each breath. The knuckles of his sword hand ached.

With a sinking, sick rage, Dafyd knew what he had to do if he was to live.

"You swore before God," Dafyd said, softly enough that only the pair of them could hear him. "Now, oathbreaker, you will surrender or you will die."

Palliot glanced around him, uncertain. Afraid.

And, his mother's son after all, Dafyd gathered his breath and spoke louder, his head high, declaiming with every ounce of theater that he could muster.

"Ursin Palliot, you have been tested by God! As His agent upon this earth, I bear witness to your failure. Kneel before me. Kneel before God and confess your sins, or else die here and die forever!"

Dafyd lifted his sad, shattered sword, and it might have been a blade of fire. Palliot took a step back.

"Look in my eyes," Dafyd said, softly again. He used the same tone Rosmund had in speaking of shaved dice and marked cards: sorrowful, sympathetic, and made terrible by its truth. "You cannot win."

For a moment, Dafyd thought Palliot would kneel, and then that the man would strike him down.

Ursin Palliot, Duke of Lakefell and Warden of the South, turned and fled. When he passed the border mark, every man and woman in the court drew in a breath, and then their voices rose as one-like breaking waves, thunder, a landslide of rock and stone-to bear witness to the trial's end.

Dafyd dropped his sword, turned, and spat. At the exultant Duchess's side, Rosmund smiled, and then shrugged, and then looked away. Only the two of them understood that in his victory, Dafyd had lost. Dafyd Laician, once Duke of Westford, and now-by the grace of God-King.