Jonathan Strahan - Eclipse Three

"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.