Another mirthless smile twisted the Holly King’s blood-red gash of a mouth.
Shrike waited on the off chance that the Holly King would consult with his squire—a wiry sprite with tufted ears and a wine-stain birthmark blooming across the left side of their face—and don his customary suit of full plate.
But the Holly King merely strode past him to continue on through the feast-hall and down the spiralling stair out of the bower.
Shrike followed in his wake swift and silent as a shadow.
The throng hushed as the two kings entered the duelling field. Shrike searched the sea of faces for Wren. He did not find him. Other familiar faces emerged in his stead—the mottled moth from the Wild Hunt, and Nell. Shrike supposed he shouldn’t feel surprised that those he ran with under the full moon would come to see how he fared in battle.
As the two kings reached the centre mark, the Holly King turned to cast one final glance back up at the queen’s bower. The glimmer in his eyes froze before it ever reached his cheeks. He raised his two-handed longsword aloft in salute, then resheathed it, as to begin the fight fair.
Shrike did no such thing. Instead he cast his gaze over the crowd in a last desperate quest for Wren. He’d almost consigned himself to defeat when he spied him at last—a pale bespeckled face, chestnut locks tumbling in disarray over his brow, his dark eyes wide and deep with a longing that sang through Shrike’s own heart.
Shrike vowed to return to his arms. Then put him from his mind for the remainder of the duel.
The herald—an apple-cheeked, toad-mouthed courtier in exquisite wasp-lace—called for the combatants to take their places marked on either side of a ring some three ells wide burned into the ground. He held up the queen’s token between them. A scrap of emerald velvet, shimmering with sunbeams, a portent of the spring to come. Then he turned to the queen herself for the signal.
Shrike didn’t bother glancing back at her bower.
She gave her sign regardless, for the herald dropped the token and leapt backwards out of the fray as it fluttered to the ground.
The moment the merest corner touched the dead grass, the peal of metal against metal rang out through the cold air as the Holly King unsheathed his longsword.
Shrike did the same with his arming sword an instant after. He had time to do little else before the first blow fell from the Holly King’s blade and forced him to dive to the side. The blade sang as it cleaved the air by his head.
In its wake there came a sharp sting in the tip of Shrike’s ear. Something cold trickled down its length.
First blood.
The crowd roared in approval.
While Shrike and the Holly King stood of a like height and swung with a like arm, the Holly King’s two-handed longsword had far greater reach than Shrike’s mere arming sword clenched in his left hand. Shrike couldn’t hope to strike him without leaping into the longsword’s range. He risked being cut down before he could ever land a hit.
Worse yet, the Holly King had trained as a knight under the full weight of plate for Shrike knew not how many decades. Perhaps even centuries. Had he worn such a suit of armour now, Shrike could’ve danced around him until his strength gave out and then darted in for a swift killing blow through his visor. Bereft of such protection, the Holly King had made himself all the stronger, all the faster, and all the more ready to run Shrike down. He could strike as swift as a falcon.
Shrike would just have to prove swifter.
No sooner had his first blow fallen than the Holly King shifted his grip on the hilt and brought it up and around for another swing at Shrike’s head. Shrike fell into a crouch. The blade sliced through where his throat had been. He rolled aside, leaping up beside the Holly King.
And darted backward as the Holly King spun to attack him.
But not fast enough.
~
Crack!
The terrible impact rang out across the field like a thunderbolt cleaving a tree in twain.
Wren’s hands flew to his mouth. The crowd leapt and cheered, surging in a bloodthirsty tide. The young man amidst the milkmaids let out a particularly gruesome guffaw. Wren didn’t dare breathe. It seemed the world had ceased turning the instant the blow fell.
The sword had struck Shrike in the side. The Holly King’s blade came away crimson. And the horrible noise, the crunch of metal against boiled leather and bone—
But Shrike rolled.
At first it seemed as though the force of the blow had thrown him aside, but as Wren watched him tumble, he realized Shrike had purposefully dodged. Not entirely, not quite fast enough for that, but dodged all the same, and when his feet came under him again he staggered upright.
And Wren’s hopes rose with him.
