Chapter Twenty-Six The Unknighting of Benedict Castor the Third #3
Benji stared up at Maude, tears in his blue eyes. “Will you cast the first stone, Maude?”
“There will be no stoning,” Brenna Bassett said.
“Tory was a hard girl to know, Benedict Castor, but she was my daughter; I could tell just how wont she was to please you. Perhaps that is why she allowed you to think we of the Cliffs, who abhor violence, would suffer a duel to finalize this tournament of yours.”
Brenna’s gaze dropped to the arming sword on Benji’s belt.
The one he’d killed me with. “But now I find myself inclined to give you what you wanted. The duel shall commence. Let your sword be your final weapon, King Castor.” Her breaths came rapidly, tears pooling in her eyes.
“May it be a quicker death than the one my daughter endured.”
The whites of Benji’s eyes were red. “Against whom will I fight?”
My hands began to fidget. “I’ll do it,” I told Sybil. “I’m already the bad knight, the knave.” My throat felt too tight. “I should be the one to kill him. I can do it.”
Sybil looked into my eyes. “I know you can. But for fuck’s sake, Rory.” She dropped a delicate finger over the gargoyle’s shoulder. Stood on her toes. Looked into my eyes, then kissed me. “Permit me.”
Sybil stepped forward and the crowd parted. “Me,” she called out over the beach. “He’ll be fighting me.”
There was no dais, no elevated box, no arena.
Knights and nobles, merchants, scribes, oarsmen, foresters, and weavers of the Cliffs climbed to the bluff above that they might get a clear view of the beach.
No coin was paid, there were no purple banners, no cheering crowd or beating drum.
Folk were solemn. Here, in the Cliffs of Bellidine, where love and heartbreak were revered, there was no pretending the spectacle would be a balm over the calamity that had befallen them.
The duel was precisely what Benji had wanted: fixed combatants and a fixed outcome. He stood alone now upon tracks in the sand in the center of the beach, waiting for that outcome. Brenna Bassett, Sybil, Maude, the gargoyle, and I remained in the sand with him. Not in solidarity—
But to make sure that outcome was delivered.
Back straight, wind in her hair, Sybil clutched her hammer, an unmitigated symbol of power, a portent—or promise—of violence. She traded final words with Brenna Bassett.
I stood with Maude and the gargoyle near the king. Benji didn’t look at us. He was peering at the sea.
I tried to keep an even voice. “Do you remember the day your grandfather died?”
“Pith, Rory. What does that have to do with anything?”
“Do you remember?”
I could barely hear his voice over the waves. “Yes.”
“I told you not to look back, Benji. And you haven’t.” It didn’t matter how tightly I leashed it—sorrow broke through and my voice cracked. “You’ve never looked back. You march forward, never noting who you trod upon. And even when the world crumbles in your wake, still you do not look back.”
“What would you have me do? Stop and smell the fucking flowers?” The king’s laugh was small.
“You never understood, either of you, what it was like growing up, knowing everything I did was for show. I had to be malleable, pious, virtuous. I did everything I could to make the noble families like me, because it was they who would make me king, and we couldn’t take up the mantle and kill the Omens and change Traum unless they looked at me and saw exactly what they wanted to see. ”
He turned, his blue eyes finding me over his shoulder. “What of myself did I ever have to look back on when I spent my whole life trying to be everything to everyone?”
Salt air pushed my hair, my tears, from my face.
Time meant nothing. I was still a foundling nobody, and Benji was a child, and I would carry him away from all the things that might hurt him.
But then I saw Sybil standing ahead of me and remembered: I was not a nobody, and though he still looked it from time to time, Benedict Castor the Third was not a boy. He had not been in some while.
“Would that things were different,” the gargoyle murmured.
“If it means anything,” Benji whispered, “I never dreamed it would end like this.”
Maude was still holding the Artful Brigand’s coin. She did not offer Benji her hand or her words, but she did look him in the eye, love—and heartbreak—written in the lines of her face.
Brenna Bassett called up to folk on the bluff, her voice catching the wind and echoing along the beach. “The Diviner’s weapon of choice is a hammer. The king shall bear his arming sword. Here on the beach, they shall fight.”
“Until I am dead.” Benji’s breath shook. “She’s a coward not to say so.”
Except no one, not even Maude, was brave enough to say it.
Sybil came forward, facing Benji head-on like she once had the Omens, her spine straightened by resolve.
Slowly, feet dragging, Benji did the same.
The sun set over the Sighing Sea, its final rays of light hitting Sybil’s armor, her crown, her visage so bright she was a beacon, astounding and terrifying.
Hammer in hand, the queen of Traum stepped forward to kill the king.