Jonathan Strahan - Eclipse Three

"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.