Through the press rode the knights, hewing and hacking about them as they sought to come to grips with one another. They roared with anger, and footmen stumbled out of their way as quickly as they could, but stumbled and went down as often as they stumbled to safety.
Prince Brion chopped his way to Earl Marshal, blood singing high within him, head filled with visions of the honor of crossing swords with one of the finest knights in Europe. He chopped, he roared, and the marshal turned his steed at the last minute, shield rising to meet Brion's broadsword. Then they hewed and hacked at one another while their warhorses circled about and about until finally the old knight struck a third blow in exactly the same line on Brion's shield, and the metal and wood fell apart. Brion snatched at his dagger, better than no defense at all, but the marshal spurred his horse and struck the prince squarely with his own shield. Brion fell, and the marshal bellowed, "Surrender! Your prince is down!"
His knights echoed the cry, and the foot soldiers froze. Then, one by one, the attackers threw down their spears, but kept their shields high.
"Mercy, Lord Marshal." Prince Brion struggled up to his knees, hands upraised.
"Mercy?" The marshal glowered down at him. "Wherefore should I show mercy to a traitor and a would-be parricide?"
"Mercy for my men and knights!" Brion cried. "This is no work of theirs! No will of their own has driven them to fight their king, only loyalty to me!"
The marshal towered above him, immobile as a rock, for long seconds. Then he said, "Even so. We shall show them quarter." He turned to his aide-de-camp. "Bid the knights surrender their swords; we shall hold them for ransom."
"It shall be done, my lord." The aide lifted his visor. "What of the footmen?"
"Bind them and march them back to Castle Westborn," the marshal commanded.
His footmen lowered their spears. The attackers finally set down their shields and turned their backs; the defenders drew thongs from their belts and tied wrists together. A knight with a dozen men started them back the way the marshal's army had taken, the knight visibly reluctant to miss his chance of glory in the main battle yet to come.
"Take up the march again," Earl Marshal told his aide, "and pray that we have not come too late to aid our lord the king."
The aide nodded and turned away to relay the order. As the army moved off down the road, the marshal turned back to the prince. "For your deeds, Your Highness, I should smite you down where you kneel. But you are the son of my sovereign liege, and for that I will spare your life."
"I—I thank you, my lord." But Brion could only stare up at Earl Marshal, stricken by so stinging a rebuke from so chivalrous a knight. As the marshal turned away, Brion bowed his head, for the first time doubting the rightness of his cause.
Earl Marshal spurred his horse to a canter, to overtake his own army. As he neared them, though, a soldier looked back at the sound of the earl's hooves, looked back and stared, mouth and eyes wide in shock.
The earl turned to look back even as he turned his charger, and saw a knight in blue armor riding down the trail toward the prince, who was struggling to his feet with the aid of a roadside boulder. He heard the galloping hooves and looked up just in time for the huge broadsword to strike him down again.
The marshal shouted in anger at so foul a blow against a knight unhorsed, and spurred his charger, riding to the rescue of the man he had just condemned.
Brion looked up and saw his death. He held up a hand, crying, "Hold! Grant me this boon, since you mean to take my life—let me at least look upon the face of the man who slays me!"
The Blue Knight hesitated for a moment, then lifted his visor, revealing only darkness and emptiness within.
Brion screamed with fear, but even as the huge sword stabbed down, his cry changed to anger. He seized the steel leg of his opponent and tried to pull himself up, bellowing, "Sorcery!" Then the sword lanced into the crack between breastplate and gorget, down beneath the collarbone toward the heart. The prince's eyes rolled up as his body fell full-length into the dust of the road.
The Blue Knight turned his horse and rode away.
Seconds later the Earl Marshal pounded to a halt and swung himself down to kneel by the prince's body. He swung open the visor, but one look at the pallid face told him all. Slowly, he slipped off a gauntlet and reached down to close the prince's eyes. More slowly still, he closed the visor. He looked up as several knights reined in their horses beside him. "Take up his body and bear it in state to his father, men of mine," he told them, "for he died with honor, though he died by a foul blow."
The knights lifted their visors in respect. Then two of them reached down to help the marshal mount again, while footmen came to lash spears and a cloak into an improvised litter. They used it to take up the body of the murdered prince and hand it to the knights, who bore it gravely onward as they turned to follow the marshal to the battle.
But when they came to the plain on which the armies contended, there was no time to take the body to King Drustan, for they arrived in the midst of a melee. Queen Petronille and her army had taken their stand atop rising ground with a hillside at their backs, but their ground was not high enough, for the army of the king had surrounded them on three sides, and the fourth was too steep for horses. The queen sat her charger, armor glinting from the waist up, mail skirt hidden beneath silk, hewing about her desperately, crying, "Hold them! Strike down upon them! Hold them till their cowardly master comes to strike his own blows! Oh, where is my relief? Where is my son, my Brion, with all his knights and his men?"
At the edge of the fray Earl Marshal drew rein, holding up a gauntleted hand to halt his army.
"We have come too late," said his aide-de-camp. "Could they not have waited battle for us?"
"They have not," the marshal returned, "but we can shorten it for them. Lay the prince's body atop the hill and set knights and a dozen men to guard it! Then follow me, for we must attack the queen from the rear and shorten this battle. We may yet save some hundreds of men's lives by this!" Then he spurred his mount and charged into the melee, bellowing his war-cry. His army followed him, yelling for blood, as four knights turned away with regret to lead a dozen soldiers up the nearest slope, bearing the prince's body with them.
The soldiers, however, were not disappointed.
With the marshal striking from the rear, the battle was short indeed; even Queen Petronille saw she would have to surrender, and called for mercy. When her knights and men were disarmed and bound and she herself was hemmed about by armored men, she endured her husband's gloating as he decried her for a traitor, then jeered further at her for an unnatural mother and wife. The marshal then dismounted and approached them both, with a solemn pace and thunderous brows. Even Drustan, late arrived to the scene, realized that the news must be bad, for he broke off his sneering just as Petronille's throat was swelling with a scathing retort—but she swallowed it as she saw the Earl Marshal's face.
"What news have you for us, my lord?" the king demanded.
Ponderously, the marshal knelt and bowed his head. "The worst, Majesties."
"Call her 'Majesty' no more, for she has abdicated by this rebellion," Drustan commanded, but apprehension filled his face.
"What news could you give me that is worse than my defeat?" Petronille asked, but spoke with foreboding.
That, of course, was exactly what the marshal had intended—some slight warning, so that his sovereign and his queen might brace themselves at least a little. "It is the prince, my lord—Prince Brion."
"Tell us," Drustan commanded, his face granite.
Petronille held her breath.
Earl Marshal launched into an account of Brion's ambush and defeat, of the sparing of his life—then of the treacherous attack of the Blue Knight, and the prince's death.
"Surely it cannot be so," Drustan said, his face white.
"I shall not believe it until I see his body!" Petronille exclaimed.
"Come, then," the marshal said gravely.
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Footmen helped him to mount. King and queen alike were horsed and followed. Up the hill they rode.
They found four knights and a dozen men lying unconscious. Of the prince's body, there was no sign.
"He has been stolen away!" Earl Marshal cried, then dismounted and wrenched off his helmet, bowing his head. "Strike if you will, Your Majesty, for your son's body was in my keeping!"
Then Queen Petronille began to scream.
The stick swung high. Papa lifted his own staff to block it, then swung the lower end at his opponent. The soldier dropped his own staff, and Papa's stick cracked against it a second before the soldier caught him a glancing blow on his crown with the tip.
It was only a tap, and though it hurt, it wasn't any major pain. Papa stepped back, laughing. "Well struck, Trooper Cole! I yield me!"
"Well struck yourself." The trooper lowered his staff, grinning. "Your pardon, milord, but I never expect noblemen to be as skilled with the quarterstaff as we peasants."
"I studied it quite seriously at one time." Papa remembered his pugilstick training in marine boot camp. "Though I own I've improved considerably since coming to this castle and always having sparring partners available. Still, I think that's enough for one morning, Cole. Shall we rest a moment and take a stoup of ale?"
"Gladly, if Your Lordship pleases." Cole grinned and followed Papa to a table at the side of the yard, where they each tapped a small mug from a huge keg. Papa sipped, reflecting that to these people, ale was only a beverage, and surely its alcohol content was low enough to qualify it as such. Soldiers frequently drank ale with their breakfasts—and lunches, and dinners. In fact, they were joining a group of other soldiers who were taking a break in their morning practice, watching their fellows who still swung and blocked in the exercise yard and discussing their merits.
"Elbert is quick, but he is still clumsy," one soldier opined.
"Aye, but improved," a sergeant pointed out. "A little more instruction, and he'll be able with a spear as well."
"Will he then be ready for the halberd?" Papa asked.
A silence fell on the group. The sergeant broke it. "Ready to begin the halberd, yes. Your pardon, milord, but we are still amazed that a nobleman will practice with us commoners."
That is because I was born one, Papa thought, but aloud he only said, "I may have to command you, if King Drustan brings war to this castle, Sergeant, and I believe in coming to know my troops as well as I'm able. Besides, you have knowledge that I lack."
The men shifted from foot to foot with a brief mutter, and the sergeant said, "Begging your pardon, milord, but most knights consider the quarterstaff and halberd to be below their notice."
"Until one cuts them in the midst of battle," Papa said dryly. "Still, I'm not only speaking of arms and weapons, Sergeant. For example, I suspect there is much you men saw and heard about the Bretanglian royal family that we above the salt did not."
Several of the troopers laughed, and the rest grinned. Cole nodded, and the sergeant smiled as he said, "Might be we did, milord, but I doubt you'd want to hear it."
"Try me," Papa invited, returning his grin.
"Well..." The sergeant glanced to both sides elaborately and leaned close to Papa, muttering behind his hand—and winning a few more laughs for his performance. "Those of us set to guard the guards who guarded King Drustan's and Queen Petronille's suite did notice that they argued whenever they were alone. Quite loudly, too."
"That doesn't surprise me," Papa told him. "You couldn't understand the words, though."
"No, we were too far away—but I think the Bretanglian guardsmen caught the odd word or two, and it made them, shall we say, nervous."
"I should think it would." Papa considered the range of topics for royal argument—adultery, control over the Merovencian provinces, adultery, which son should inherit what, adultery... "How long did they argue on their last night here?"
The soldiers fell silent again, finding great fascination in the patterns of their bootlaces.
"Come, come," Papa cajoled. "No one is blaming any of you—and I certainly won't say where I heard it. How long?"
"Perhaps the half of an hour," the sergeant told him. "Then, say the guards who were in the hall, the king stalked out in high dudgeon, whipping his cloak about him. But he wasn't even gone an hour!"
"Home in plenty of time to start arguing with his wife again, eh?"
"Of course." The sergeant spread his hands. "What else would they do?"
"What indeed?" Papa could have mentioned Drustan's rumored libido, and Petronille's still-vibrant beauty, but he was too busy wondering if Drustan really could have found the Inn of the Courier Snail, sneaked in to stick a knife in his son's ribs, then run back to the castle in less than an hour.
The sergeant kept his eyes carefully on his boot toes. "They say that with some couples, fighting leads to lovemaking."
"I've heard that, and seen a few," Papa agreed, "but those fights always have the quality of a game about them, keen enjoyment just in the shaping of clever phrases. Such fights are not as bitter as those between King Drustan and Queen Petronille."
"I suppose not," the sergeant agreed in chagrin.
Another soldier said, "I'd say their love has died."
"Not died, perhaps," Papa said, "but it's certainly in a coma."
Ordinarily, Rosamund loved rainy days. Even now, gazing through the ripply glass in the leaded panes of her window, she watched the pot-boy poling his little skiff back to shore with a string of fish dragging in the water—her supper, no doubt. The rain had caught him unawares, in spite of the lowering sky. He would probably curse it, but she blessed it. The gentle susurrus of the raindrops soothed her, and the rain's blending of the trees and bushes with the wall enclosing her country house lulled her, letting her own melancholy harmonize with the world around her...
...until the mist lifted and showed her the walls of the castle, only a hundred yards distant.
The royal castle. The castle where her nemesis, King Drustan, would live if he won the war. Rosamund imagined the king coming to call on her with news of his victory, stepping too close to her, smiling down possessively, lecherously, reaching out to touch...
She turned away from the window, shuddering, and prayed with all her heart for the queen to win. Without Petronille's protection, without Brion's, shorn even of the mild protection of a betrothal to the heir, she would be at the king's mercy in every way, and with no defense. She swore to herself that she would rather die. She touched the front of her bodice to caress the small hard oval of the crystal teardrop she wore between her breasts, the clear little tear in its basket of leaden strips that held the single drop of poison old Aunt Maude, her grandmother's sister, had given her the day before she left her father's palace in southern Merovence.
"God grant that you shall never need it, my dear," the old woman said, "but if it is a choice between your virtue or your life, choose virtue, for a life without it is a torment for a woman in this day and age."
Little Rosamund had shied away from the crystal drop, asking, "Is there no other way?"
"There is this." Aunt Maude turned to show her a log of wood lying on a velvet cushion.
Rosamund stared. "What good is a log? And why do you treat it with such luxury?"
"Because that is where a princess should lay her head." Aunt Maude passed her hand over the wood, chanting a rhyme in archaic words—and the air about the log shimmered, its form seeming to melt and reorder itself, and there lay a perfect likeness of little Rosamund's own head! She cried out, hand covering her mouth, and Aunt Maude explained, "It is now no longer a stick, but a stock. Find one that is as long as you are, and it will take on the appearance of your whole body. Moreover, another spell will make it walk with your gait and talk with your voice for three days. Then the spell will wear off and let it become only a log of wood again. Come, recite the spells after me, learn them by heart, for they may someday give you time to escape. Even then, though, yo
u may need the drop of poison, for you may be caught, and life without virtue or love is worse than no life at all."
She hadn't explained, but she hadn't needed to—Rosamund understood her full well now, had understood for several years, ever since she blossomed into womanhood and King Drustan's eye had glinted whenever he saw her. Her own future husband had been worse, for Prince Gaheris had pressed her not to wait for the wedding, whenever he could catch her alone.
"A betrothal is almost a wedding," he had protested.
"It is not," Rosamund asserted, "or you would be willing to wait for it."
Even so, she had dreaded the day it would come, for her flesh shrank whenever Gaheris touched her.
A knock at the door brought her back to the present. Her heart hammered with apprehension, but she kept her voice calm as she called out, "Who knocks?"
"Count Sonor, my princess," the rich baritone answered.
"Enter, my gaoler," Rosamund said. After all, she could scarcely deny him. She braced herself for an unpleasant interview.
"Scarcely your gaoler, my lady." Count Sonor entered. "Say rather, your host." But his smile belied his words and told her that he relished his task.
No, worse—his smile was unctuous, his eye glittered. Rosamund's heart beat more faintly at the sight, for there was a gloating air about the nobleman that made her demand, "Have you news for me, milord?"
"The best." Count Sonor's eye flashed with malice. "King Drustan has put down the rebels and will ride home in triumph tomorrow."
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