He got tired of the endlessly battering blade and shifted his bulky,
ponderous weight out from under his shield. He let the shield drop. The knight
’s sword met air instead of metal and kept going, dragging the dark knight
after it. He drove his blade into earth and clung to it, maintaining a
perilous balance.
Sun leaped off Daimon’s blade and into his eyes as he lifted it. Somehow, the
black knight pulled his own sword out of the ground and angled it upward to
block the fall of Daimon’s. Metal sheared against metal. The two knights
pushed against one another’s weight, lumbering around the crossed blades. The
muscles in Daimon’s arms and back, wrung to the utmost, could only maintain
their thrust against the dark knight’s strength; the knight seemed equally
unable to change the equilibrium of their power.
Then the black knight let his own blade shift, yield, just enough, as he
twisted to one side, that the weight of Daimon’s body armor pulled him off-
balance. The step he tried to take to catch himself was blocked by the knight
’s blade, run into ground against Daimon’s foot.
He fell facedown with a grunt of breath. The black knight rolled him onto his
back, not without some difficulty. The tip of his blade found a delicate,
defenseless line of skin between helm and breastplate. Daimon gazed at the
hard, expressionless, inhuman head looming over him. The knight’s shadow fell
into his eyes; he heard the harsh, weary rasp of his breath within his helm.
Who are you? he demanded silently, urgently of the shadow-knight, of himself.
Who are you?
“I yield,” he said to the exasperating uncertainty, and the cold metal left
his throat. He heard the thud of the massive hilt hitting the ground. The
black knight raised both hands, wrestled off the helm, and Daimon saw the
elegant, broad-boned, smiling face beneath it.
His breath stopped. Field squires swarmed around them both. Hands hoisted him
upright, drew off his helm. The distant whistling and cheers from the
onlookers grew suddenly loud; he sucked in fresh, sweet air, and heard Jeremy
Barleycorn’s amused voice from the announcer’s stand.
“Dame Scotia Malory has defeated Prince Daimon Wyvernbourne in knightly
combat with armor and broadsword. Beware, House Wyvernbourne, the powers of
the north.”
He looked for her as the squires helped him rise. But he only saw the back of
her head, the severe braid of honey-colored hair suddenly fall out of its coil
and down the black mantle, as she was escorted off the field.
Later, Daimon sat among the wyverns in the huge, ancient hall named after
them. The great, winged, long-necked, barb-tailed beasts swarmed across the
stone walls and the ceiling, shadowy with age, memories of themselves. The
throne built for the first Wyvernbourne king stood on a simple dais against a
backdrop of the great stone caves and peaks where the wyverns lived. When the
king arrived, he would sit there, as his ancestors had done, surrounded by
wyverns’ faces rearing out of the black wood of the back and the armrests,
their wild, staring eyes golden lumps of amber forged long before Wyvernhold
existed. A podium with a microphone, looking bizarre among the wyverns, had
been placed on each side of the dais.
Knights who had spent the earlier hours on the practice field crowded into the
rows of black-and-gilt chairs. Their faces were sunburned; they smelled of
soap and shampoo. Daimon, adrift in his thoughts, barely heard their
greetings. A lovely scent of lavender beguiled him out of himself as someone
took a seat near him. He straightened, glancing around for the source of the
lavender, and saw his half siblings, the two princes Roarke and Ingram, and
the sister born between them, Princess Isolde. They scattered themselves
around Daimon; as knights shifted to let them pass, he caught again the faint,
elusive fragrance.
“Too bad you bothered to fight in full armor,” Ingram said, taking a seat
behind Daimon and prodding his shoulder. “You missed the sight of Isolde
smacking the head off the joust dummy with her lance. It went flying. Nearly
took out Jeremy Barleycorn in the announcer’s stand. He ducked just in time,
or it would have been his head flying after it. What’s this all about?
Anybody know?”
“Not a clue,” Daimon answered shortly.
“Something Lord Skelton found,” Isolde said, settling her ivory braid over
one broad shoulder as she sat. She and Ingram had their mother’s hair, and
the only blue eyes in the family for several generations. “Something in a
book, I think.”
“A book,” Ingram marveled. “Our father gathers an assembly of knights from
all over the realm because of a book? A real one, do you think? Or one of
those floating around in the cloud?”
“Parchment, I would guess,” Roarke said. He added, at his younger brother’s
silence, “That’s paper made of goatskin.”