It was only an initial spar: striking, blocking, their grunts and wrenching movements the focus of these hundred folk. They parted quickly and stared. Mars breathed evenly. This was not at all like those fights in Aremoria, the autumn Mars and Novanos had mentored Ban. This was so different: the look in the king’s eyes was not encouraging, but hot and deadly.
Mars darted out with his sword. Ban parried, they turned, engaging too dangerously for Ban; unbreakable though the blade might be, he’d lose his sword if they crossed. Ban kicked, stomping the heel of his boot to Mars’s thigh. The king cursed and staggered back. Then he feinted, drawing Ban out, but the Fox was ready and stuck with buckler instead of sword, knocking Mars’s off center. They clashed, and Ban’s feet slid in the gravel. He did not dig his sword under as he’d been taught: that was a killing blow.
Instead he swung with the pommel, hitting Mars’s face. The king smiled grimly and spat blood. “You make those death strikes, Ban. Fight me like you betrayed me: with no thought of my heart.”
The Fox opened his mouth to speak, but Mars dove at Ban, who barely escaped. He turned and slammed his buckler into Mars’s sword, but Mars’s buckler skimmed his gut just as he spun away. The blade of the king’s sword cut along Ban’s arm, dragging at the mail shirt. Ban tucked in, slicing back.
Another flurry of strikes and blocks, Ban giving ground under the strong onslaught, until he fell to one knee. He gasped for air and struck back with his sword. His buckler was gone, his left hand numb. Ban needed another shield, or hammer, or even a knife, but there was nothing. This was single combat, not melee.
He got up, bruises screaming.
Mars threw away his buckler, too, in a fit of fairness that had Ban sneering.
“Was it kind or sporting, what I did to you, Mars?”
“I am not like you,” the king answered.
Ban laughed wildly, choking on it. “You could never be!” His vision swam; he staggered and barely caught himself. He’d taken a knock to the temple; he couldn’t recount when, but the throbbing, the blood sticking down his jaw, was proof.
Both men fell silent and still, but for their heaving shoulders. A crow called, laughing as only crows laugh.
“I loved you,” Mars finally said, bleakly.
“And I you,” Ban answered.
The king scoffed. Tears or sweat streaked his bare, handsome cheeks.
“It was not you that I meant…” Ban shook his head. It did not matter; Ban could not defend his heart. There was nothing to say, no value in it or truth, anyway. “Again?” he offered instead, raising his whispering sword.
It would be the end, he knew; shieldless, he did not stand a chance.
“Surrender, Ban,” Elia called from the edge of the spectator circle. “Give in. Please.”
Ban did not even glance at her; he couldn’t. He attacked once more, with a cry.
He was finished, hurt, and so there was no surprise when Mars batted him away easily. Ban kicked, grabbed at Mars’s sword arm, then spun and shoved his shoulder into the king’s back. Mars went down, caught himself and rolled, and Ban chased after, sword raised. Mars lifted his legs in order to kick Ban away with hard boot strikes. Ban dodged, and stabbed, but shifted at the last moment, penetrating mail, but only to skim Mars’s ribs.
Blood flowed, and Ban couldn’t see through his sudden wash of furious tears.
He lurched away. He should surrender. He could stop. Especially if he refused to win this fight! If Ban couldn’t bring himself to take the kill strike, he should give in.
But no. No. He was Ban the Fox, soldier, spy, and little else. He would die here, on this battlefield.
With a terrible groan, Ban attacked again. They engaged, and Mars threw Ban back, slicing his sword in a glorious arc that caught Ban’s arm.
The limb shocked into hot pain, then numbness.
Ban tried to clutch at it, but his fingers stuck too tight around his sword, melded in pain to his aching arm. The Fox swung again, but it was slow, so slow. His sword hissed furiously.
Amazement, and something like peace, blossomed in Ban’s heart when, at last, Mars’s sword found its mark.
The blade slid into Ban’s flesh over his heart and just below his left shoulder, a rod of lightning through his body. Blood burst down his chest, soaking even his back. Mars jumped forward, dropped his sword, and grabbed his Fox against him.
They fell together to their knees; Ban’s name on the king’s bloody lips.
Ban heard nothing else, only his name, again and again. He opened his mouth to say—nothing.
There was nothing.
He thought,
here I am at last.
REGAN
REGAN LEAR TURNED away from the battle and walked north toward the White Forest.
Always, always she had been the second daughter of Lear. Gaela’s younger sister. The middle, the princess, not the heir, because her glorious older sister would rule. Regan was the pillar for Gaela’s wounded, raging heart, a web of iron roots dug deep into the earth of Innis Lear to hold Gaela high.
Regan did not know what to be, without her elder sister.
But Gaela was dead.
So Regan walked, and walked. The wind gusted hard at her back, pushing her along the way. Good, yes, Regan was glad the wind agreed this was the way to go.
Back to the earth, to the heart of the island. To a spring, or a grove of ash trees. Always ashes had been her favorite: slender and gray, at first, but spreading and gorgeous as they grew strong. The whisper of their leaves was always a delicate song.
Why did she feel so cold? She shivered hard, as if ill.
All Regan could hope for now was a bed of roots, a cool, damp nest in which to close her eyes and simply stop. Fade into the earth as if she’d always been a part of it. Where Gaela would be soon, and Connley already waited.
Regan was a worm of decay, twining about the forest roots, always between death and new life, but never quite alive. Everyone around her died; perhaps it was the reason she could bear no child. There was not enough life in her.
Her sister’s cheek had been so cold.
Regan shuddered again, and the wind trailed sharp fingers down her spine.
“She asked for the poison your mother used,” the witch had said softly. “I did not expect her to drink it.”
It had not seemed a thing to believe, and yet, there was the proof of it before Regan’s eyes: Gaela laid out by the hearth in Brona Hartfare’s room, sleeping, dead.
Regan had clawed her skin until blood dripped like hot tears down her face, and pulled Gaela’s dagger free of the sheath at her thigh. Brona had leaned away, but Regan did not strike. She’d touched the cold blade to her palm, then the back of her hand, dragging the tip up her wrist and over her sleeve, leveling it at her own heart.
But the sun had nearly risen, and Ban the Fox waited for her in the Refuge of Thorns. Regan had kissed her cold sister and gone out onto the moor to find her other sister, dull and alone. The dagger loose in her hand.
Shouldn’t she feel more?
Now the duel was over, too, and Regan walked. For a few minutes or an hour, or a day or a year, she lost the scale of time. There was such emptiness inside her.
Regan, pretty Regan, whispered the wind.
She replied not at all. The wind had given her nothing. The roots had given her nothing. She’d never had any reason to ask the stars. Only Gaela had loved her, and then Connley.
Ban the Fox might have, but he was dead. So was her mother. Her father, Lear, dead. All her enemies were dead, but all her family, too.
“Regan!”
The witch ignored the sound of her name, even from her baby sister’s voice, and walked on, her pace the same, toward the edge of the forest. Her slippers skidded on the rocky slope, and Regan crested it, stumbling down into the forest valley. Blue sky shone down on the black and gray and white forest, scratched here and there by scarlet and orange because it was so late in the year. Beautiful, the brilliant colors of death. On Innis Lear they wore white for the dead, but death was so vibrant. It was a sun of colors. Gaela was bold, and now she was dead. Regan had always been cool and shaded. She was still alive.
Not for long.
The shadows of the White Forest overcame her, and Regan lifted her gaze to the trees. Where the ash? she murmured in their language, and the wind pushed her forward.