The ambassador scampered backward out of reach. “Again!”
Stuck now with his waist twisted to one side, Wren saw nothing for it but to try and thump him with the flat of the blade on the back-swing.
The ambassador leapt nimbly away. “And again!”
Not fast enough. Never fast enough, despite all the hours he’d spent running up and down the warren watch-tower. He needed more strength behind the scythe, he thought, and this time put his shoulders as well as his waist into the swing as he advanced.
It flew high. It flew wide. It flew so far out of his expectations that he struggled to halt its spin before the blade drove into the ground.
The ambassador ducked beneath the swinging iron—but only just.
Wren stared at him, then at the traitor blade, then back to the ambassador.
“I could’ve killed you,” Wren blurted.
“You could have,” the ambassador conceded with a half-shrug. “But you didn’t!”
Wren stared at him. The ambassador seemed not to notice.
“Boiled leather ought to withstand iron’s first blow,” the ambassador reasoned. He stroked his pointed chin as he considered the weapon in Wren’s hands. “But I wouldn’t depend upon it to withstand a second or third.”
The ambassador didn’t wear any armour that Wren could see. Certainly not boiled leather.
Shrike, on the other hand…
Wren swallowed hard. “So I shall have but one chance to err.”
“If that,” chirped the ambassador.
Wren could not dismiss the notion so lightly. Shrike stood taller than the ambassador. Far taller. Wren’s wild swing might well have clipped him beneath his chin.
Or slit his throat.
Either ignorant of Wren’s dawning horror, or indifferent to it, the ambassador continued. “There is a method to cure wounds of iron. One must carve out the wound itself with a silver knife and stitch the remaining flesh together with threads of silver—or spider-silk—and a silver needle. It is not a pleasant prospect, and must be performed with haste.”
“How much haste?” Wren asked almost before the ambassador had finished the word.
“Within minutes.”
Minutes Wren doubted he and Shrike would have in the wake of the solstice duel.
The ambassador fought with a different figure—a different stride—a different weapon. Wren might learn to strike with the scythe, true enough. But the ambassador couldn’t teach him how to duel Shrike. Or how to keep from killing him.
Shrike alone could do that.
And as Wren lifted his gaze from his iron weapon to the ambassador’s masked face, he saw those cat-slit eyes patiently waiting for him to draw that very conclusion.
They returned to the garden of Blackthorn cottage some hours before Shrike expected them, judging from his confused expression as their entrance drew him away from picking strawberries in the little thorn-fenced garden.
“Will you join us in the warren meadow?” Wren asked.
Shrike arched an eyebrow at the scythe but nonetheless replied, “Aye.”
“And bring your sword and armour,” Wren added.
Both Shrike’s brows arose, and an unmistakable gleam of intrigue lit his dark eyes.
“I’m not going to fight you,” Wren insisted. “But if we are to dance a deadly waltz to rival Ostara, it would do well for both of us to know the steps.”
