Thorn shuddered in distaste, wondering to what he had tied himself. “Tyler is more my creature than yours,” he said.
Both heads turned. “There are no creatures. The wonder of the thing is that they do it to themselves.” The laughter barked out, mad and high. “Oh, we shall have merry times. Look, Thorn. For all their work, we have just erased Alba as if it had never been-with one arrow.”
One of him turned a somersault and the other began to juggle swords.
“But the Queen…” Thorn began-and then he saw it, too.
“The Queen has only a few hours to live,” the Ashes chortled. “She’ll be killed by her own!”
De Vrailly could not face humiliation, or people. He walked away-past the royal box, past the horse enclosure at the back, and then west to his own beautiful white pavilion.
There was no one there to disarm him-no wine, no water.
He knelt on his prie-dieu.
He raised his arms, and then, almost without volition, he screamed, “WHY?”
Amicia rose as she saw de Rohan knocked from his horse. No one would pay her any mind, whether she was be-spelled or not, and she slipped lightly along the bench, cursed by those who needed a better view.
She was still ten men away when the arrow struck the King. Instantly, she reached out in the aethereal.
She had healed him before, and had today wiped the drug from his body, so she bounded after him into the dimming darkness of his inner sanctum. He had no talent and so his sanctum had no form-
The arrow had struck below his heart. Even as she reached for the damage inside him, and tried to slow the tearing of his great heart, he was going.
Amicia knew what was at stake-the peace of Alba, the lives of innocents. She did what she would not otherwise have, what she had been taught never to do.
She followed the fleeting shadow that was leaving the sanctum, trying to hold it with one aethereal hand while her other hand bound the damaged vein that gushed blood into the cavity of his body and his lungs.
For a long breath, all seemed to be in balance. And then she realized that all her balance was a lie, and she was following him down into the darkness.
She had made a terrible error.
There was a near-riot around the Queen’s barriers and men were running around the King’s box-it was hard for Gabriel to assess what was happening twenty paces away while keeping his focus on de Rohan.
“The King is hit!” shouted a man.
A woman screamed.
Gabriel felt the ring on his finger burn and a great store of his ops torn away from him.
Amicia.
De Rohan read his body language aright, and attacked, a flurry of mighty two-handed strokes. That Gabriel guessed they were fuelled by desperation took nothing from their intensity.
De Rohan cut from his shoulder-right, left, right, like a strong boy practising at a pell. But de Rohan was the match for any knight. His blows were too hard to ignore, and fast-as fast as Mag’s stitches in fine linen.
Gabriel gave a step. Then another-his second cover.
The third fast blow came with a deception, a reversal.
Part of it hit his skull cap, and he was stunned. But he’d trained to fight when stunned, and his body continued-his left hand grabbed the blade of his sword and he raised it, making any further smashing blows difficult to throw and pointless.
And now it was Gabriel who was desperate.
He could feel Amicia-slipping. Somewhere…
He lost de Rohan’s sword and thrust desperately with his own, and hit something even as he took another blow in the side-this one under his arm. It drew blood, de Rohan’s point pricking through his chain mail.
With terrifying clarity, he realized that whatever was happening to Amicia was severing her link to him. And his invulnerability.
De Rohan cut-a flashy lateral cut from the hip that snapped up to be almost vertical. Gabriel counter-cut.
He and de Rohan came together crossed at the hilts, and de Rohan tried to control his sword at the bind, pushing hard. He had an instant of initiative and he let his sword roll as he stepped, and he slammed his free left hand into de Rohan’s face.
Blood flowed-
De Rohan’s blade licked out-creased his cap and cut into his forehead-again. The flow of blood almost blinded him.
But his experience of near death at the hands of an assassin in Morea steadied him. The wounds to his forehead were not killing blows. His vision functioned.
De Rohan was very strong, even with his hand wounded. And he threw strong blows.
“I’ve given him too much time,” Gabriel said in the calm of his palace. He took an instant-no time at all, in the real of the fight-to push all the ops he could easily find-straight down his link to Amicia.
Then he lowered his sword-all the way to Coda Longa.
Amicia was on her bridge and yet she was drowning, and there was neither calm nor focus, and her world was utterly black. She had let go of the King-he was gone into the grasp of death, and in her fear and anguish Amicia feared that she, too, was already dead and her disembodied soul was struggling futilely, as she could no longer make any contact with the real.
But something was keeping her anchored on her bridge. She could feel its aethereal planks under her feet.
It was utterly black around her, but as she struggled against the dark she saw a flash of pale light-the light of the sun, from the ring on her finger.
She found the strength to pray.
The bridge under her feet began to give way.
She was in the midst of death. She had gone too far-too far, too far.
For some reason she looked up.
Above her, in the contradictory way of the aethereal, there was light that never entered the depths where she was. Above her was God’s light, and she was deep into death’s darkness. The darkness seemed heavy and potent, and she imagined that she was past the point from which she could return to air and light, except-except-
Gabriel’s sword snapped up, low to high, a rising head cut that turned slightly in its last hand’s breadth.
De Rohan snapped a strong cover, throwing a hard blow at the flat of Gabriel’s sword.
The Green Knight’s sword snapped aside-driven hard to the outside.
Gabriel turned it, as he had always intended, the pommel rotating under his hand as the blade rotated on top of it, the point transcribing the base of a cone and the cross guard turning in place until the Green Knight’s sword had changed sides of his adversary’s blade in the beat of a faery’s wing.
Gabriel reached in with his left hand, caught his own sword point and the middle of his opponent’s blade in the same grip. Ruthlessly, he used his own left hand as a guide, his sharp blade cutting his glove and his hand as his point-neatly guided-slid through de Rohan’s left eye and into his brain.
De Rohan was dead long before his knees hit the ground.
Before his head followed his knees, Gabriel was in his own palace and his hands formed a pillar of fire-