Durand stepped inside the waiting ring. Ouen bared his gold teeth, lowering his frame into a ponderous fighting crouch. "On your guard," he rumbled gleefully. Durand saw the girl look fully in his direction. Her foal-dark eyes were suddenly wide.
Then light snagged in the razor's edges of the giant's long blade, and Creation sagged away. There was only the giant and the sword and the fire.
Everything began.
Ouen swung the winking razor-edges like a sledgehammer. The blade flashed in circles—the same wheeling assault that had just failed Lamoric. Durand waited, suddenly in Agryn's shoes. Finally, when the giant reached with a long swing, Durand ducked in, shield high. Ouen caught his counter, the big man's knee ramming Durand in the ballocks. Durand rolled, knowing that Ouen and Lamoric were not the same man.
"He's got a better memory than that!" Badan said. The wolfish knight was in the circle with him. Before Durand could untie himself, gleeful Badan levered him roughly to his feet.
Ouen bowed slightly, the fire shivering in his teeth.
Fighting for air, Durand raised his sword. In the pain and sickness after the heavy blow, some part of his mind noticed the wink of his own blade, and it sparked a realization: In this game, the sword was nothing more than a distraction. A peer could hardly hack a man dead at a campfire sparring match. But Ouen was not Agryn to play some sort of touch-and-talk match. No. This was a fight. Ouen wanted Durand to leave this game black and blue.
Durand understood.
The big man crouched, this time advancing until he became a monstrous breathing shadow between Durand and the fire.
Between one step and the next, Durand darted in, throwing out a flash of steel to cover his real intent. At the same moment, he locked his fist in his shield straps and threw a punch straight from the earth. The tight arc buried the corner of the shield in the knight's kidney.
But that was not the end. Durand leapt in, ramming his shoulder under the big knight's ribs. He bulled forward. With all his might, he lifted, legs pounding down. The bonfire exploded under his feet. And, as they burst out the other side, Ouen finally toppled backward. The man slammed into the turf among the feet and shins of his scattering audience with Durand's full weight bearing down on his chest.
The giant's wind was gone. The crowd stood in shocked silence.
Exultant and more than a bit startled, Durand began to extricate himself, but felt a fist lock in the back of his gambeson. Ouen trapped him face-to-face.
"Well done," Ouen gasped, baring his big glinting teeth despite what must have been suffocating pain. "But look here." Something wiggled like a trout below Durand's chin and a razor's edge scraped his throat. "A draw, I think."
Durand looked back into the man's eyes, the sprawling hair, the matted beard, the glinting grin. He had to laugh.
The hand released him.
As he swayed to his knees, curtains of silk and fox fur swung shut around him. Though it was skirts that surrounded him, he might have been kneeling in the midst of a four-post bed. Clear, clear eyes looked down.
"Impressive," said the Lady of the Bower. She reached a tiny hand, and Durand climbed to h
is feet. As he stood, the scentl
ess warmth of her breath touched his forehead. He blinked into her eyes, taking in lips like dusty cherries and skin without fault or blemish.
"Thank you," Durand said.
A minuscule crease appeared where the arc of the Lady's brow approached the bridge of her nose. 'There is something about you," she said. Her eyes held his, as though he were a cipher to be puzzled out. "Broad shoulders. I wonder who you will be. Who you are." Durand's lust stirred as her gaze moved over him, though he saw no arousal in her manner. She was so close. He could see the night air moving in the red
down at her hairline. Her li
ps were not quite closed.
"I am Durand of Col," he said, carefully.
"Yes." His answer had been insufficient. Irrelevant.
She smiled—like an apology. "You are welcome here; Durand." Her fingers pressed his arm, conducting a wave of warmth. She looked up to the others. "All of you are welcome."
For a moment, as he held her in his eyes, it was all Durand could do to swallow.
13. The Price of Secrets
G
uthred put him to work. While the others drank or rested, he lugged barrel after barrel to the forest edge. Eerie howls made their way through the branches. The sky churned silently. He saw eye-corner shapes on the move. He worked until something appeared from the trees.
"Where in God's name?" the doubled shape said, and pitched backward over a barrel of flour. There was a sharp crack, and a white cloud billowed high.
Setting his teeth, Durand stooped to pick a man out of Guthred's supplies. For an instant, the man's face was covered by a shapeless hat. He grumbled and pushed it back.
"Heremund!"
Durand might have laughed, but for the skald's look: wide-eyed through a mask of flour. The skald's expression was one of horror.
"Durand?"
"Aye."
"Oh. I don't like this. Not at all. What're you doing here?" "I'm with Lamoric of Gireth." "What? I thought you were serving Lord—" "No." Heremund must not mention the name. "I'm with Lamoric now."
"Bloody Hesperand," Heremund grumbled. "I was a half a league from the borders, I'm bloody sure I was."
"Heremund!" Durand said. He found his hands shaking. The homely skald was like a rope thrown from the past. Durand could hardly speak. "Good to see you."
"I was bound for Mornaway and Hellebore. There were riders in fine cloaks skittering from hall to hall all through Yrlac, and rumors of Lord Radomor and King Ragnal and—"
The skald stopped, taking in the tents and the castle and the wide expanse of grass.
"Oh no. It's the tournament, ain't it? We're over the Glass. Gods."
Durand heard shouting. He followed the skald's glance and
was astonished to see the last few men carrying torches out of the camp.
"I suppose it's underway now," said Heremund, and, muttering like a wise woman, the bowlegged skald marched off toward the light.
When they returned
to the field, everyone was gone.
Durand and the skald stood under a full moon framed by silken billows of cloud. An alien moon in an alien Heaven. The tents were still as the bottom of some brown lake, and the pale watchers from the battlements were the only signs of anything resembling life.
"Queen of Heaven, Heremund, I just left them."
"Must have started."
"In the dark?"
"This way, I reckon." The little man tramped off in the direction of Durand's well. Durand stalked after.
"It's a particular sort of vengeance, this," Heremund muttered.
As they crossed onto the broad shoulder of the green, a scene out of legend stretched before them.
Gleaming in the preternatural half-light, the Lady and her maids waited below the crest of the long slope to the village, standing as though on a stage. Heremund and Durand hesitated a dozen yards behind the women. It seemed the Lady was carrying a sheaf of flowers. It was hard to make out.
Below these figures, knights and shield-bearers and grooms and servants waited in two silent ranks, marking an aisle from the salt white castle down to the village fields. Every man wore his full panoply: armor, surcoats, and tall leather crests on the helms under their arms. Everything glittered as cool and colorless as the glacial moon.
"There was hardly time," said Durand. He had not been lugging barrels so long.
"Come," said Heremund. "Is that Lamoric there on the left? We'll slip in behind."
They descended the slope.
Finally, Durand picked out Coensar's silver wing of hair. "Here," Durand said. It was his turn to lead, bringing the skald into the back rank of Lamoric's conroi. The young lord wore his red helm. Every man was rapt, looking uphill to the Lady and her handmaids, so, with a glance to Heremund, who had nothing to say, Durand slipped forward, compelled to see for himself.
As he stepped into the front rank, the Lady and her handmaids looked up, though not at him. They stared beyond the double file of knights to the plowed fields of the village below. The peasants of the manor had silently gathered at the far edge of the manor's fields, separated as though waiting on facing shores of a black lake.
At this glance from the Lady, one old man among the peasants nodded and stepped onto the plowed earth, crossing the field for the castle. Although his feet slipped and slithered among the furrows, he kept his balance and his stiff-necked pace never wavered.
Durand did not, at first, see what was happening nearer to hand: Both the Lady and the maids of the Bower had set out from the hilltop. But he straightened as they passed, bright and solemn as children at a grave.
Heremund shook his head.
Just at the edge of the field, the company of maidens met the lonely figure of the old man. He reached up from the mud as the Bower's Lady bent, extending the bulky bouquet she had been carrying. Durand could hear the crackle and rustle of that bouquet—no pale flowers, but rather a moon-silvered sheaf of wheat. The old man reached up and, with wordless dignity, accepted the sheaf as though it were a swaddled child.
"The Spring Maid," said Heremund. "Seems the Lady of the Bower was a devotee of the women's cults. The full moon and the harvest rite. Last corn. All of it rings of the Spring Maid." He peered into the Heavens. "It must have been the Reaper's Moon when they left."
The skald's whisper was the only voice. Durand could not have made a sound.
The villagers on the far bank had dropped to their knees. No one moved. A shiver crawled through Durand. The only things in motion on the whole face of Creation were those nine women.
But, somehow, Heremund continued to speak. "The Maid's like your blackthorn boys."
The skald's voice seemed a desecration, wild and impossible.
"Everything was dying. The Son of Morning and the Host Below had set themselves to ending Creation. Tines of frost slid through the flesh of the world, as the Eye of Heaven guttered. And the Mother finally came. She set the moons over the darkness. She set the wheel of life moving in Creation, drawing man and woman apart, and together. But there was fear. It was not enough. The world was still falling into night. Freezing to the end of time."
"Heremund,"
whispered Durand.
The skald frowned, but continued. 'The Maid, she was the first woman. Or one of them. And she grieved for the death of the living things. She cried out, and every living thing heard her."
Durand understood the silence then, or thought he did. It was the memory of that cry.
The village elder bowed toward his Lady. The Lady nodded. With the sheaf in the crook of his arm, his fingers caressed seed from the brittle head. He bent. A shiver of his hand sowed the first seed of what must be the winter crop. He stroked, bent, and sowed.
Durand saw that some of the knights had shut their eyes.
The man made his methodical progress down the length of the furlong, and, finally, when he had finished his journey, there was nothing left of the sheaf. He turned to his Lady, and she nodded low in reply, she and her maidens all turning back toward the castle. In silence then, the procession of maidens made the walk back between the lines of armored men.
Heremund was shaking his head as the women disappeared into the mouth of the pale castle. "It was the Reaper's Moon. Full. And the cross-quarter day. It is just what the Masters would have chosen."
All around Durand, the knights began to sag out of their rigid lines. Coensar, apparently loath to step into the path that the procession had so recently taken, stepped out behind his troops.
"Just as before," he said.
He seemed to scan the crowd for a moment. His cool eyes fell on Durand, then Heremund. He paused a moment. "He came from the forest," Durand supplied.
"I am called Heremund. A skald."
A trace of something touched the captain's features: hard mirth. "Then you will have sung my song."
The skald was mystified, then he blinked, suddenly flustered. "Aye, well. There is a story," he admitted. Durand tried to remember.
The captain nodded, then left them to call for the attention of Lamoric's conroi. He sounded tired as he spoke to them all.
"I remind you if you've forgotten, or tell you if you never heard: No one sleeps who means to fight. It's the rule of this place."
While it was a mad regulation, Durand was not alone in nodding. What room was there for doubt under the weight of the presence poised over Bower Mead?