Had she done this? Had she made this happen?
She gasped as Nightfall came forward, switched direction in a blink. Steel rang once, twice, Leo lashed back, but too slow and Stour slipped around it, his sword catching Leo’s leg and making him stagger.
‘No.’ A kind of shudder went through Finree, and Rikke gripped her hand harder than ever. Tried to be strong for both of them though she wasn’t halfway strong enough for herself. Tried to bare her teeth, and focus on Stour’s smirk, and turn the sucking of fear and guilt into anger. Tried to make something from it she could use.
You cannot force the Long Eye open, no more than you can order the tide to come in. But where was the harm in trying?
She planted her fists on her knees and sat forward. Refusing to blink. Glaring at the grass like she could glare through it to what might come. Willing that heat into her eye.
Might be she saw what she wanted to. The dead knew there’d been plenty o’ that going on the past few days. But for the briefest moment, she thought she saw ghosts there, in the Circle. Faint, they were, and flickering. Hints of figures. Stour and Leo, and their swords, torn apart like cobwebs on the breeze as the real men passed through them.
Rikke curled back her lips, and clenched her fists, and squeezed her jaw so hard it felt like her teeth might crack, and she stared at the Circle as if she was staring into a gale.
She made herself see.
Stour was laughing now. Giggling as if every contact was a brilliant joke.
Leo wasn’t finding it funny. He told himself he was the Young Lion. The Lord Governor of Angland. The proud son of a proud line of warriors, with glory in his grasp. But in truth, he was scarcely even trying to hit back. Barniva’s sword was getting heavier every time he swung it. He was scared if he attacked, he’d give Stour a fatal opening. But he was scared if he defended, things could only go one way.
It was getting to the point where he was just scared.
Stour jerked forward and Leo stumbled back. Just a mocking feint with the foot, a twitch of the hand, and Leo was sent scampering. Stour wasn’t only aiming to win now, but to make a show of it. To teach a lesson. To show the whole North that the Great Wolf was a man to be feared. His sword flickered past Leo’s tired guard. Stour could’ve spitted him, but he chose just to prick his stomach. Prick him then whip away again, laughing.
He was the Young Lion, but he was bleeding. Blood on his face, blood on his leg. Red streaks down his right hand, grip of Barniva’s sword sticky with it. The idea of blood watering the Circle had thrilled him when he listened to stories of the Bloody-Nine. Thrills you a lot less when it’s your own.
He was the Young Lion, but he was tiring. He panted, gasped, cold air raw in his throat, but he could never get enough breath. His knees were trembling, the snap going out of his arm. No way he could outlast Stour now. His only chance was to out-think him. Trouble was, he’d never been much of a thinker. If he had been, he might not have taken the challenge in the first place.
His eyes darted about the Circle, searching for some clue.
His friends, their shields drooping. Glaward chewing his lip. Jin tearing his beard. Antaup crestfallen. Jurand wincing as if he felt every wound himself. He caught a glimpse of his mother, stricken, pale, staring. The Dogman sat grim beside her, and Rikke, glaring into the Circle, fiddling with the ring through her nose.
Fight dirty, she’d told him. No one remembers how the fight was won, only who won it. A gritty philosophy. Words to die by.
Stour feinted and Leo fell back again, stumbled again, but this time he went down harder than he had to. He put a hand out behind as if to steady himself, tore up a handful of grass. Stour came on again, grinning, and Leo growled as he forced the snap into his legs, sprang up, throwing his grass in Stour’s face, swinging his sword at Stour’s neck.
Even blinking, spitting and off balance, Nightfall managed to parry, but Leo was already coming at him with all the strength he had left. He smashed his forehead into Stour’s mouth with a glorious crunch, making the Great Wolf stagger back onto the shields of his men.
For a moment, his eyes were bleary, his bloody mouth wide with surprise. Leo took a great whooping breath, brought his sword whistling up and over, but the blade hacked into the shields where Stour had been a moment before, and Leo only just kept his grip on the buzzing hilt.
Stour danced back, spitting grass, showing red teeth as he grinned. ‘Oh, now we got us a fight!’
He darted one way, switched in an instant and whipped past on the other side, quick as the wind and as hard to pin down. Leo was left stranded, gasped as the edge of Stour’s sword whipped across his thigh, left a cold line that soon turned burning hot. It was the most he could do to stay standing as the blood soaked into his trouser leg.
He wasn’t a lion, he was a scared little boy who didn’t want to die.
But it was too late to listen to Mother now.
Brock was cut bad. Red streaks down his face from the cut on his cheek, trousers dark around the cut on his leg, hand red from the cut on his arm. Watering the Circle with his blood, as the skalds have it. Not a pleasant sight, but nothing Clover hadn’t seen before. Hadn’t lived before. If pleasant sights are what you’re after, the Circle’s a bad place to come.
Stour was sure of victory. Grinning like a wolf, strutting like a cock. The kind that rules the farmyard rather’n the kind you piss with, but Clover reckoned both meanings fit the heir to the North pretty well. He laughed, arms spread wide, urging the crowd to ever-louder shrieks of admiration and delight. Some men take to applause like other men take to drink. The more they get, the more they need, until too much is never enough.
Scale was loving it almost as much as his nephew, shaking his iron hand at the Circle and roaring, ‘Play with him!’ The admiration of one cock for another. Seemed to sting an effort from Brock, who lumbered in, sluggish from the bleeding, took a clumsy swing you could see coming ten strides off. Stour flicked it away with a contemptuous sneer, could’ve chopped Brock across the back but chose to let him stumble by.
‘Finish him, damn it!’ snarled Black Calder, as disgusted by his son’s display as his brother was delighted by it.
Stour could’ve finished Brock five times now but he was enjoying hooking him so much, he kept letting him wriggle free so he could hook him again. Clover thought that ill-advised, to say the least. You take no risks in the Circle and give no chances, not with all you’ve got and all you’ll ever have in the balance. It only takes a little twist of fate to land you back in the mud, and fate can be a twisty little bastard.
No one knew that better than Clover.
Rikke’s head spun, sight swam, stomach churned as she stared down into the Circle. Her left eye was hot, burning in her head. She forced it open wider, staring, staring.
Leo bent, clumsy, hunched around the wound in his side, blood-streaked top to toe. Stour looked quicker than ever, surer than ever, prancing, dancing, only a short step from blowing kisses to the audience.
Rikke saw ghosts of swords and spears above the crowd. Of flags shifting with a wind that wasn’t there. The battle yesterday? A battle yet to come? By the dead, she wanted to be sick. Her head was pulsing. The cold sweat tickled at her scalp, trickled down her face, but she didn’t dare shift her eyes. Didn’t dare blink. Didn’t dare break the spell.
There were ghosts in the Circle, too. Shimmering and shifting. Ghosts of Leo and of Stour. Ghosts of hands and feet and faces. Ghosts of swords.