"I don't . . . " Dafyd began, but Rosmund talked over him.
"Your mother's turned to piety and prayer. Bessin and Palliot have turned to intrigue. I've turned to sex. Back to sex. These are different dressings on the same wound. The plague reminded us that we're powerless, and now we're trying to forget."
"This isn't about the plague," Dafyd said.
"Of course it is."
"It's not!"
Rosmund looked down, lips pressed tight.
"I didn't come here to talk about the plague or God or the wounds of the kingdom," Dafyd said, venom in his voice. "I came because I thought of all the men I know, I could tell my suspicions to you. That you would listen."
They were silent for a moment.
"And didn't I?" Rosmund asked.
A woman's voice came, slushy and warm and dazed.
"Love? Did something happen?"
"Nothing, sweet thing," Rosmund said. "It's nothing. A bad dream."
Dafyd gathered himself to leave, but Rosmund put a hand on his arm. His touch was gentle and familiar, and Dafyd had to force himself not to push it away.
"You weren't like this before the plague," Rosmund said.
"Like what?"
"Angry. Afraid," he said. And then, "You didn't whine as much."
Sleep didn't come easily. In the privacy of his imagination, Dafyd told Rosmund exactly why the priest was an idiot. He dressed down his mother and her overbearing piety. He confronted Lord Bessin and Duke Palliot. His words unanswerable and his logic profound, his opponents abased themselves before him. The rage that kept the Duke from rest didn't cool.
He lay in the darkness of his bed until the quiet murmurs of the guards changed and the first, tentative songs that the birds sang before first light began. He would have said sleep had never come had a rough voice not wakened him.
"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.
"I'll provide a hostage," Dafyd said. "Tell Palliot to come to the winter garden at moonset. He can bring as many men as he likes, but tell him to bring only the ones he trusts."
Dafyd walked away before Bessin could respond. His heart raced and his hands shook.
He found Rosmund in a fire circle, clapping and singing along as women in too little clothing danced through the flames. Dafyd put his hand on the priest's shoulder.
"I need a favor," he whispered. Rosmund lost the beat, then stopped clapping.
"What's the matter?"
"I need a favor," Dafyd said again.
Rosmund broke away from the circle and followed him into darkness without word or question, and Dafyd loved him for it.
The winter garden spread out at the southern edge of the palace, wide paths of stone and gravel winding through low hedge and dwarf trees all within webwork walls of glass and iron. Dafyd's father had said the king could grow iris and rose in it all year round, but there were no blooms now. The still air smelled of rotting plants and soil. The two sat on a low stone bench lit by a single candle as the crescent moon slipped below the distant, dark horizon. The pale flicker of lamp light came from a darkened arch, growing steadily brighter. Bessin and five men in the colors of his house approached.
The Duke stood.
"This is the hostage?" Bessin asked.
"Apparently so," Rosmund said.
"If you will join us, father," Bessin said.
Rosmund stood, took a long, deep breath, and met Dafyd's gaze with an expression both skeptical and determined.
"It'll be fine," Dafyd said.
"I'm reassured."
Bessin, Rosmund, and the men at arms walked away together, vanishing under the archway. Dafyd didn't sit. A moment later, Palliot appeared with three swordsmen behind him. The guards stopped short; Palliot came on, his steps slow and wary. He was a tall man, broad across the shoulder. His jaw ran toward jowls though he wasn't more than three years older than Dafyd. His fair hair was pulled back and his dark eyes shifted through the darkness.
"Duke Palliot."
"Westford," he replied with a small but formal bow. "You wanted words."
"Yes," Dafyd said, then took a deep breath. "The kingdom's in pain. It needs a king strong enough to hold it together while the wounds knit."
"It does," Palliot said, as if answering an accusation.
"You should do it."
Palliot crossed his arms, head cocked as if he'd heard an unfamiliar sound.
"You're forfeiting the trial?"
"Not that. I can't. There are too many people who back me for my father's sake," Dafyd said. "If we don't go through with it, there'll be talk that your rule isn't legitimate. I can't forfeit. But I can lose."
"Lose," Palliot repeated.
"A few good blows for each of us for the sake of form. I'll come too near the border mark, and you'll knock me over it. I'll swear my fealty to you, and no one need ever doubt it was a fair fight."
"And in return you want . . . what?"
Dafyd laughed, surprised by the bitterness in the sound.
"The last year undone," he said. "I want the dead alive. I want the graves undug. I want God to say it was a mistake and that He takes it back. But failing that, I want it to be your problem and not mine."
Somewhere in the speech, tears had stolen into his eyes, and he wiped them away with a sleeve. Palliot was quiet for a long moment.
"You'd give up your honor? This trial isn't to the death."
"Yes, it is," he said. "If not on the court, then in the field. Let's not pretend otherwise."
The larger man laughed. Dafyd thought there was relief in it.
"You're wiser than I expected," Palliot said, his eyes still narrow and his voice cautious.
"We understand one another, then?" Dafyd said.
Palliot was silent for longer than Dafyd liked, the dark eyes searching the empty air before the man grunted.
"Will you swear to it before God?" Palliot asked.
It was all Dafyd could do not to laugh.
"If you'd like," he said. "I swear before God."
"Then I do as well," Palliot said, and held out his hand. Dafyd took it. Palliot had an impressive grip.
They stood together for a moment, and then Dafyd watched Palliot walk back to his men, head held high. Silently, they vanished into the shadows, leaving him to sit on the bench. Someone approached, gravel complaining at each footstep. And then a wet sound, and Rosmund said something obscene.
"You're well?" Dafyd asked as his friend sat beside him. Rosmund's right leg was caked to the ankle with a greenish muck.
"Ruined my hose," he said ruefully. "And you?"
"I said what I came to say."
"Well, I'm pleased they didn't kill me over it."
The single candle flickered, then stood straight again. The air wasn't particularly cold, but Dafyd was shivering.
"Rosmund, can I ask you something?"
"As a friend or a priest?"
"Priest."
"Anything you like, my child," he said, only half-mocking. Dafyd took a long, slow breath.
"Does God have a plan for us?"
"I assume so. Everyone seems to think He does."
"I believe God is evil," Dafyd said. It was the first time he had said the words aloud, and he felt the air itself clear when he said them.
"Is that why you're conspiring to lose the trial?" Rosmund asked, his voice as comfortable as if they'd been discussing nothing more than food or which girls were prettiest. "To take the decision away from Him?"
"I suppose so."
"It won't work. It can't. Whatever happens tomorrow will have been God's will," Rosmund said. "You win? God did it. Palliot? God will have done that too. You both fall down when you step on the court and stub your toes too badly to walk? Still God."
"I'll know," Dafyd said. "That's enough."
"What if ceding to Palliot was God's plan all along? How would you know?"
Dafyd growled, a small noise in the back of his throat. Rosmund didn't seem to hear it.
"It doesn't matter whether God is good or God is evil," the priest went on. "It doesn't even matter if God is God. As long as He's a tale told after the fact, He's inevitable. You can't beat Him."
"Watch me," Dafyd said.
"Listen to me. As a priest, I'm telling you the dice are shaved. The cards are marked. Good or evil or
a fairy story grown fat on too many tellings, it doesn't matter. Even if there is no God, He will win."
Dafyd Laician, Duke of Westford, spent the following day in one of two equally placed couches overlooking the melee field. Grass still clung to the margins, but days of battles and games had reduced the center to mud. There were four combats planned: a children's melee at dawn, a battle of ten against ten with maces and flails, a great battle of twenty to a side in the early afternoon, and the generally comic infirm melee at evening where the wounded and spent of the previous days' games took the field in splints and bandages.
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