He moved forward in a rush and swung the weighted fist. He was grinning. The prince's screams as he fell to the stone floor with his smashed and squirting nose clutched in his hands would be, Beson thought, shrill and babyish.
Peter moved back easily, his feet moving as gracefully as if in a dance. He seized Beson's fist and was not surprised in the least by its weight-he had seen the gleam of metal between Beson's swelled fingers. Peter pulled with a wiry strength that Beson would not have believed five minutes ago. He spun through the air and hit the curving inner wall of Peter's "sitting room" with a crash that rattled the few teeth remaining in his jaws. Stars exploded in his head. The metal cylinder flew from his fist and rolled across the floor. And before Beson could even begin to recover, Peter had sprung after it and seized it. He moved with the simple, pure liquidity of a cat.
This can't be happening, Beson thought with dawning dismay and stupid surprise. This absolutely can't be happening.
He had never feared entering the two-room prison at the top of the Needle, because there had never been a prisoner here, not of noble blood, not of royal blood, who could best him. Oh, there had been some famous fights up here, but he had taught them all who was boss. Perhaps they ruled the roost down below, but up here he was the boss, and they came to respect his dirty, compact power. But now this stripling of a boy...
Bellowing with rage, Beson came off the wall, shaking his head to clear it, and charged Peter, who had folded the cylinder of metal into his own right hand. The Lesser Warders stood staring at this unexpected development with stupid wonder. Nei-ther thought of interfering; they could believe what was hap-pening no more than Beson himself.
Beson ran at Peter with his arms outstretched. Now that the prince had gotten his fist weight away from him, Beson had no more interest in the sort of free-for-all swinging and hitting he thought of as "boxing." He meant to close with Peter, grapple with him, drive him to the floor, land on top of him, and then choke him unconscious.
But the space where Peter had been emptied with magical suddenness as the boy stepped aside and dropped into a crouch. As the squat, troll-like Chief Warder went past, trying to turn, Peter hit him three times with his right fist, which was closed around the metal cylinder. Hardly fair, Peter thought, but, then, it wasn't I that brought this piece of metal into it, was it? The blows did not look hard at all. If Beson had been watching a fight and had seen those three quick, fluttering punches thrown, he would have laughed and called them "sissy punches." Beson's idea of a real man's punch was a roundhouse blow that made the air whistle.
But they weren't sissy punches at all, no matter what the likes of Beson might have thought. Each was driven out from the shoulder, just as Peter's boxing instructor had taught him in their twice-weekly classes over the last six years. The punches were economical, they didn't make the air whistle, but Beson felt as if he had been kicked three times in rapid succession by a very small pony with very big hoofs. There was a flare of agony across the left side of his face as his cheekbone broke. To Beson, it sounded as if a small branch had snapped inside his head. He was driven into the wall again. He hit it like a rag doll and bounced back buckle-kneed. He stared at the prince with obvious dismay.
The Lesser Warders peering through the hole in the door were agog with surprise. Beson, being beaten by a boy? It was as unbelievable as rain would have been coming down from a clear blue sky. One of them now looked at the key in his hand, thought briefly of going in there, then thought better of it. A man could get hurt in there. He slipped the key into his pocket, where he could later claim to have forgotten it.
"Are you ready to talk reasonably now?" Peter wasn't even out of breath. "This is silly. I require only two small favors of you, favors for which you can count on being well and amply repaid. You-"
With a roar, Beson flung himself at Peter again. This time Peter was not expecting an attack, but he managed to pull back anyway, the way a matador pulls back from a bull which charges unexpectedly-the matador may be surprised, perhaps even gored, but he rarely loses his grace. Peter did not lose his, but he was wounded. Beson's nails were long, ragged, and filthy-more like animal claws than human nails-and he liked to tell his Lesser Warders (on dark winter's nights when a gruesome tale seemed required) about the time he had slit a prisoner's neck from ear to ear with one of those thumbnails.
Now one drew a bloody line down Peter's left cheek as Beson flailed his way by. The cut zigzagged from temple to jawline, missing Peter's left eye by hardly half an inch. Peter's cheek fell open in a flap, and all his life he would bear the scar of his encounter with Beson there.