Chapter Twenty-Seven One Last Spectacle
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
ONE LAST SPECTACLE
Wind pushed my hair from my face, but my crown did not shift.
Benji and I stood opposite each other upon the sand, a king and a Diviner who had both reached the pinnacle of their ambitions. Benji, who had wanted so desperately to give folk a common enemy—never dreaming it would be himself—and the Diviner who’d vowed to kill him.
We stepped forward, bereft of helmets, looking intently into each other’s eyes. “How is it?” Benji asked, his voice threadbare. “The wound in your abdomen? Still in pain, Six?”
“My name is Sybil.” I cracked my neck. Bent my knees. “Yes. I’m in pain. Yet here I stand.”
“Exactly where you want to be, I imagine.”
“It didn’t have to be this way, Benji.”
“I know, I know.” He touched his brow, saluting me—
And lunged.
His sword slammed against my pauldron, sending me jolting several steps back.
He was stronger than I’d thought he’d be.
Several paces away, the others were shouting. “Pay attention, Sybil,” Maude cried.
“Sweetheart.” Rory’s hands were in the air. “Move your fucking feet.”
That gargoyle, who seemed heartened by the noise, began to clap. “Hit him, Bartholomew! Hit him where the moon doesn’t shine!”
I regained myself. Watched Benji’s feet, his shoulders, his eyes. This time when he swung out to hit me, his gauntlet caught nothing but air.
But then he kicked, catching me in the abdomen. Not even my breastplate could stifle the shock and reverberations that resounded through my body—the ache in my abdomen went hot with pain.
I fell onto my back in the sand.
The king moved with such violent haste, like he still had everything in the world to prove. He swung at me again and again. I rolled, sand flying around me, feeling the kiss, then the bite, of the top of his sword slicing the back of my neck.
Blood pooled in my coif, dropping hotly over the padded shirt beneath my breastplate, and I hauled myself up. When the king swung once more at my neck, I wielded my hammer and caught his arm, the answering knell a sharp clang that echoed over the beach.
Benji stumbled back. Struggled to keep a firm grip on his sword.
I was already running, wrapping my arms around his middle and throwing him down like a stone upon sand, then clambering on top of him.
Benji dropped his sword. He wriggled to reach it, but his arms were too short and my weight upon him too great.
The king beat his fists over my back. Wrenched his legs, trying to get out from underneath my weight—anything to dislodge me.
When that didn’t work, he slammed his forehead into my mouth, the blow so excruciating I lost vision, pain shooting into my nose and upper lip.
Benji’s fingertips were on the hilt of his sword now, and Rory, Maude, and the gargoyle were shouting. I didn’t hear them, didn’t heed them. When Benji grasped his sword, there was nothing to do but to take the hammer in my hand and, like I had a thousand times before—
Swing.
My hammer crashed against Benji’s left hand, the impact so great it bent his gauntlet. A vicious crack resounded, Benji’s fingers, along with the hilt of his sword, utterly broken.
The king screamed. With the fingers of his uninjured hand, he reached into his bent gauntlet and extracted a small knife.
I’d seen it before—his precaution on our wedding day.
Now, it was a bold and biting threat. Reckless, Benji swung it at my face, and I rolled just in time to save my nose from being carved away.
I fell onto the wet, kicked-up sand. When I looked up, Benji was already on his feet, fleeing as fast as he could to the dark mouth of one of the caves that led into the caverns beneath the Cliffs of Bellidine.
I hauled myself up. Felt the bite of salt air in my nostrils and the cut inside my mouth where my teeth had pierced my upper lip. Hammer still in my hand, I spat blood upon the beach, proffered Rory and Maude and the gargoyle the briefest glance—
Then hurried after the king.
There were no glowing silkworm sprites to light our way this time. No life at all in the dark, dank caverns beneath the Cliffs of Bellidine. Only the occasional fissure in the rock above allowed daylight to peer in. I traveled by its leave, my eyes slow to adjust to the darkness.
Rocks tumbling in the distance, water dripping into pools, the natural noises of the caverns were like ghostly footsteps, echoing far and near. My pulse warred against them, and I gritted my teeth, straining to hear.
Farther I went, the cavern walls tight as a throat, then wide as a stomach. There was no path or firm direction. All I could do was listen.
There, in the distance. A rustle. The echoing clink of chainmail.
Benji appeared around a dark corner, swinging his knife, slamming his gauntlet into my jaw. I stumbled back, hand on my face, coughing and seething.
Benji stood before me, admiring his work.
“You’re stronger than you look,” I said, spitting blood onto his boots. “I’ll give you that.”
“Spare me, Six. You were never a good liar.”
We circled each other, treading through puddles of dank seawater, leaving footprints in a trail behind us.
He swung at me again, but without the dark corner, no element of surprise, he was vastly out of his depth.
My arm was lifted, hammer already poised.
I struck him over the breastplate, knocking him back, denting his armor and leaving him gasping for breath.
I did not stop. Hot air shooting from my nostrils, I chased Benji with my hammer, my steps a resounding clack like the Heartsore Weaver’s footsteps had once been.
We tore through the cavern, he retreating, I advancing, never giving the other a moment’s pause. We turned a corner, and the space opened into three tunnels. Above it was a worn, faded weaving. The worm grows. The cocoon is boiled. Those that remain become moths.
My feet took me where I needed to go. Forward and unflinching, like a beast moving through its own lair, I led Benji straight down the third tunnel, where I knew what waited ahead.
A pit in the earth, camouflaged by darkness, iron spikes jutting out of it.
Several times Benji’s knife drew close, near enough to draw sparks off my armor, but never enough to harm, blocked by my hammer or foiled when I moved my feet too quickly.
But then, as we neared the lip of the pit, I let the king get in a hit.
His blade slid between my rerebrace and couter, disturbing the chainmail at the crook of my arm and making me flinch.
Benji exhaled loudly, half a second of triumph.
It was all I needed.
I rushed forward, shoving him back with all my might. Benji lost his footing, then his balance. He must have felt the yawning chasm of the pit behind him because he turned his head, eyes wide, noting that there was nothing between him and several jagged pikes save air and the stench of fusty water.
I caught his injured hand, ripped him away from the edge of the pit, and threw him on the ground, delivering a devastating blow to his armor, denting his breastplate like the pikes below had once dented Rory’s.
Benji gasped. Writhed on the ground and struggled to breathe.
“You win, Six.” His voice was unrecognizable, spit pooling in the corners of his mouth.
“Even if I kill you and manage to free myself, the name Castor will fade to nothing. But it will take the Stonewater Kingdom decades, centuries, to forget the idea of you.” He was grunting.
Gasping. “What was any of it for? What was…”
He was whispering, his words as spectral as a ghost. I crouched over him, waiting to retain the last words of Benedict Castor the Third—
Benji slid his knife beneath my breastplate, sinking into the flesh, then muscle, just above my scar.
Blood bloomed, and I screamed behind my teeth.
The king let out a hot breath, pushing harder against the handle of the knife, watching as it slid farther into me.
“At least, in dying,” he said, gasping, “we will finally be equal.”
He’d lost every leg of the tournament, every hamlet and every friend, but this—besting me one final time—was the one thing Benji truly thought he would win. He pressed the blade into me with all his might, smiling, letting out quick, ravenous breaths—
The blade stopped short.
Benji’s smile faded. He redoubled his efforts, grunting as he tried with all his might to press the knife to some fatal place in my body, but the blade would not move—would not go any deeper. There was pain—gods, it hurt—but it was nothing to the consuming bite Tory’s spear had once dealt.
I looked down. Let go of Benji’s arm. Even now, with all his strength behind him, he could not push the knife any farther.
I barked out a laugh, reached up, and hit the king so hard over the chin his eyes rolled. He fell back onto the dark cavern floor, skull crashing over stones.
I picked up my hammer and stood over him. When I ripped the knife from my body, its tip was coated in limestone. I threw it into the pit and put my bare foot over Benji’s throat. “Swords and armor are nothing to stone.”
He thrashed, and I held him down, choking the air out of him. It would be as close as he ever got to drowning. “Your armor has dented, your sword has broken. And you, Benedict Castor the Third, will diminish.”
Benji’s face went a horrid purple. His eyes popped, then immediately shut.
He wasn’t dead, just unconscious, his chest still rising and falling.
And I could have done it. Could have raised my hammer a final time and killed him when he slept.
But then I saw the blood, pooling beneath his head where his skull had struck stones, and I watched him take shallow breaths beneath the dent in his armor.
No. I would not have to fell my hammer again.
The duel had finished, the spectacle concluded, my vow to kill the king ending as it had begun—in the dark.
Benji’s time was nigh.
I leaned down, laboring to lift him and sling him over my back. I carried him out of the caves, both of us bleeding into sand. When I stepped out onto the beach, familiar shapes waited in the distance. Rory, Maude, the gargoyle.
They began to run. Rory got to me first, taking my face in his hands and searching it for signs of injury. “Are you all right?”
I grunted, still holding up Benji. “He’s not dead yet.”
Maude reached us. Her hair was wild, her green eyes full of pride.
Fast as the striking serpent, Benji’s hand reached out. He caught the Artful Brigand’s coin and yanked it out of Maude’s hand. She shouted out, and I dropped the king onto the sand.
“Everyone,” he said, looking up at us and gasping, “deserves a second chance.” Benji tossed the coin—
And vanished.
The air went out of Rory and Maude and me, all of us turning in jerking motions, searching for the flickering coin and the king attached to it.
“He doesn’t have much strength left, and that breastplate is crushing him,” I said in a rush, looking out over the landscape. There wasn’t a single sign of the king. “Where would he go?”
The gargoyle, hobbling, finally reached us, panting. “Don’t just stand there dawdling, Bartholomew! Make haste! We’ve got to get back.”
All three of us turned to stare.
He looked at us as he often did. Like he thought us tragically dim-witted. “The story always returns to one place,” he said. “It always returns to the tor.”
I looked into Rory’s stone eyes and he into mine, the both of us realizing at the same time. “He’s after the spring water.”