The Privilege of the Sword (29 page)

“Married?” she gasped. “Married? To
you
?”

As she spoke the words, she realized what it meant. Married to Lord Ferris. There would be all the gowns and the jewels, the wedding ceremony and the guests and the banquet, and then she would go home with him to his house, and she would belong to him forever and he could do this to her whenever he liked, without asking. That was what it meant.

“Well, yes, married to me,” he said reasonably, and chuckled. “Were you thinking of doing this, and then marrying someone else? That’s not how it works, you sweet little slut, and you know it.”

Artemisia tried to catch her breath—once, twice, and she found the air she needed to say, “Never. I will never marry you.”

“Oh, yes, you will,” he said comfortably. “Think of it this way: at least we know now we’ll suit between the sheets. Not bad, that. Now pull yourself together; you’re a bit of a mess. I’ll find you something nice to drink, and when I come back we’ll have a little dance, shall we?” She shook her head in protest. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I won’t make you dance with any of those buffoons. I admit I enjoyed seeing them holding you there—but you’re mine now, and I won’t let you out of my hands ever again.”

M
Y UNCLE LOOKED
A
LCUIN UP AND DOWN.
“O
H.
You. I thought I got rid of you ages ago. What were you doing lurking in allegories biting me?”

“Old habits die hard?” suggested the beautiful Alcuin.

“It is a habit,” the duke said, “that I would endeavor to correct if I were you.”

“Oh, really?” Alcuin lowered his eyelids and looked up through long lashes. “And are you going to help correct me?”

As if entranced, the duke slowly moved one hand toward the handsome man’s face—but at the last moment, Alcuin turned his face away. “Leave me alone,” he said sharply. “You had your chance.”

I didn’t like this. Other people were getting interested. I looked around for the sleek man from Glinley’s, but he had slipped away from the crowd. The artists may not have known who my uncle was, but various Riversiders did, and I heard the whispering behind us:
Tremontaine
…

My uncle looked his former lover in the eye. “You shoe-scraping,” he said. “You worthless piece of trash.”

Alcuin’s face turned pale, and then dark. “Not so worthless,” he said. “I’ve got something you don’t have. Something I happen to know you want.”

He raised his chin and made a little moue with his rosy lips. A well-built dark-haired man came to his side, a sword slung low at his hips.

“Is someone,” the swordsman said to his friend, “offering you trouble?”

The duke’s face stiffened with distaste. Ignoring the swordsman, he said to Alcuin, “You can’t challenge me, you monkey’s turd. Only a noble can do that, and you’re not exactly noble; the Court of Honor would never hear your case. A civil court would sentence you to death, even if you won.”

“No one would dream of challenging you, sir.” Alcuin did not budge. “But my swordsman has every right to challenge your…your
thing
.”

My hand was on my sword. I heard the duke say, “It appears, Lady Katherine, that my old sweetheart here would like some of our blood.”

I didn’t care. I was more than ready for him.

And I did not like being called a
thing
.

Alcuin’s swordsman was much bigger than I was, and much stronger, too. He looked me up and down. “Do you really think this is even worth it?”

“Just do it,” Alcuin told him through gritted teeth.

“But—no offense, dear—but it’s a
girl,
right?” Like Alcuin, he wasn’t very bright.

“I don’t care if it’s a spotted baboon! She’s got a sword, and she offends me. So if you want to get any tonight, or ever again for that matter, you’ll draw your steel right now and teach her some respect!”

“She is a noble,” the duke drawled, “and you are not. The privilege of the sword extends only to—”

“I accept the challenge,” I said quickly. “On my own behalf, sword to sword, I accept.”

“Well, then,” my uncle said.

I looked around at the considerable crowd. “Where do we—”

“Fall back.” The duke and some others started clearing people back to form a circle. I had the sudden fierce wish that Marcus could be there, not to help me, but to see me doing it for real at last.

“Five on the girl.” The betting had begun. “Twenty on Rippington.” So that was his name. What a stupid name. Rippington.

Rippington and I faced each other across the circle. “Oh, lord,” he said, and sighed. As the challenger, he had the right to begin the match, but as the challenged, I could call the terms.

“First blood,” I said. My hand was closed around the pommel of the master’s sword. I was glad I had not let Phillip Drake talk me out of bringing it tonight. I thought, Well, at least
you’ve
done this before. I breathed deep, felt the balance in my feet. Balance is everything.

“Ready?” he asked formally.

I nodded. He drew, and I drew, and we stood at guard. Then Rippington advanced and tapped my blade gently. I didn’t move. Don’t waste your moves, and don’t show your strengths until you have to. Make them wait, and make them guess, and make them show you theirs.

Rippington fought like a training lesson. He pulled back and executed a perfect lunge, hoping to get it over with quickly, I guess, but I saw it coming a mile away and stepped gently aside to let him pass, which he did, nearly falling on his face.

“Dammit!” he said, and I heard, “Twenty on the girl.”

I turned around and attacked him in a high line to see if he’d go for it, and of course he did, opening his entire front for just long enough for me to have killed him if I had wanted to. He parried this time, and I replied a bit show-offishly with a fancy riposte, just to see if he’d follow the move. God, he was slow! I realized later he must have been drinking to be so slow and precise; he fenced as if he was doing lessons, as if he was always trying to be sure his feet were in exactly the right position. Wine is enemy to sword. But at the time, I thought that he was making fun of me, refusing to take me seriously, so I got a little flashy and began speeding things up.

Mistake. Drunk or not, his sword was still perfectly long and deathly sharp, and when we closed at close quarters I realized that he could wrench the blade from my hand simply by applying enough force. Spooked, I backed off, nearly crashing into the ring of onlookers. There were jeers; I tried not to hear them, but I knew what they meant. I looked like a fool, and I felt like one. This was not a lesson. Rippington’s blade was not tipped, and he would not pull back if he came too close. When he lunged, I felt the steel sweep past my face, and knew it
was
steel. He hadn’t been making an effort because he thought I wasn’t worth it. Now he wasn’t so nice. Now he was working harder, testing me, trying to draw me out. I kept my moves small, trying to give little away, but it was hard not to bring out my fiercest defensive moves. Save them, a voice inside me said. Save them for when you need them. Watch him and see what he does.

I watched, and I responded. The crowd was quieter now. This was the way it was supposed to be, a conversation between equals, an argument of steel. I wasn’t going to die. The worst that I could do was lose the bout, but I wasn’t going to lose if I could help it. Because at last I found the move that my opponent loved best: a nice, flashy double-riposte. I found it, and I found that I could make him do it every time. High parry, low parry, wherever I came in didn’t matter, I could count on him coming back with that double-riposte. Like making a cat jump to a piece of string. It probably worked better with a taller opponent; with me he didn’t have to reach quite so far as he was used to. He kept doing it out of habit, and because he looked good in the pose, but the difference between us made it just a little off-balance for him. That’s the problem with having one favorite move. I enticed him into it one more time, and then I came in right where I was supposed to, in a clean line straight to the—

Straight to the heart, it would have been, and I don’t know whether he could have defended himself in time, but at the last minute I realized what I was doing, and turned my wrist just a fraction so that instead the point slashed messily across his arm, tearing his shirt and the skin under it.

“Blood!” The cry went up. I fell back, gasping; I hadn’t realized I was working so hard. “First blood to—what’s your name, dearie?”

“Uh, Katherine,” I said. “Katherine Talbert.”

My uncle was gazing delightedly at me. “This,” he began, “is my—”

“Shut up!” I told him. “Just shut up, don’t say it, all right? Just for once.”

So then he was laughing so hard the red-haired artist had to hold him up. I had a feeling the red-haired artist who loved allegory was in for an interesting night.

“Alec!” Sabina had arrived; I guess it took her a long time to get down from the seashell. “Alec,
when
did I tell you there would be
fighting
at my party?”

I looked for Rippington. Alcuin was binding up his wounds surrounded by a coterie of friends. They shot me some truly dirty looks. It had never occurred to me that not everyone loved you after you’d won a fight. It wasn’t in the books. Even Richard St Vier hadn’t mentioned it.

Not that people weren’t all around me saying some very nice things, trying to get my attention. But I had no stomach for answering questions just then. I was thirsty, and I just wanted to be alone for a bit.

“Here, you.” Someone put a cup in my hands. It was the woman I’d met my first day out in Riverside, the colorful Ginnie Vandall. I drank. Water had never tasted so good. She put her arm around my waist, and I let her lead me out of the crowd. But she wanted something from me, too. “Where is he?” she murmured low and urgent in my ear. “I know those moves. Where is he?”

I broke away from her, and ran.

I ran to the furthest corner I could find, but it was already occupied, by a dark-haired woman in a truly beautiful lavender gown, a color I cannot wear. Her back was to me, but then she turned around and I recognized Artemisia Fitz-Levi, of all people.

“Oh!” she said brightly. “It’s you! Are you here, too? Are you having a good time?”

It was perfectly obvious that she’d been crying her eyes out. And her hair was a mess.

“What happened?” I asked because clearly something had, and it was not good, whatever it was.

“Oh, nothing. I’m just fine. How are you?”

Her hands were shaking. I took them in mine. They were icy cold. I said, “I’m fine. I just almost killed someone. I’m here as the duke’s bodyguard, but I think you need one more.”

She looked at me with terror. “Is my hair really awful?”

“A rat’s nest.”

Her face melted and crumpled, and she started to cry. She put her hands up over her face, as if she could hide it, and she shook her head when I tried to touch her, but I did for her what I sometimes did for my mother, and just put my arms around her until she naturally laid her head on my shoulder and clung to me, and she sobbed there for a good long while. When she got a little quieter, I disengaged enough to dig out my handkerchief and offer it to her.

“Look,” I said, “can you tell me what happened? Maybe I can do something.”

“You can’t do anything,” she sniffled. “No one can. It’s all my fault and there’s nothing I can do, but I’ll never marry him, never!”

“Marry who?”

“Lord F-Ferris. My intended. I made him bring me here, and then he—he—”

I stepped back a pace. “A nobleman brought you here? To this? What is he, an idiot?”

“He’s the Crescent Chancellor, you dolt!” Well, she was upset. “I’m supposed to marry him, but I can’t, now. I can’t marry anyone, never, ever. I’m ruined!” she wailed.

“Ruined how?”

She hiccupped and looked me in the eye. “Ruined. Exactly like in the books. That kind of ruined.”

“And your Lord Ferris stood by and let someone—”

“No. He did it himself.” I seized her sticky hand, and she gripped mine, hard. “He says I’ll learn to enjoy it. But I won’t. I won’t. I won’t marry him. I’ll never let him touch me again.”

I said, “Certainly not. Look, you’d better go home.”

“Will you take me?” she asked piteously.

“I—I’ll have to ask my uncle.”

“No! You mustn’t tell anyone! Above all, not him!”

“I won’t tell him, I’ll just…” Just what? Then I thought of something. “Look,” I said, “do you remember that day I came to see you? And you were visiting with that pretty young man?”

“Pretty enough, I suppose,” she sniffed. “That’s my cousin Lucius. Lucius Perry.”

“Your cousin! Perfect. Because he’s here, Artemisia, I saw him not long ago. I’m going to go find him, and he will take you home.”

She clutched my sleeve. “Oh, no! Don’t leave me! Lord Ferris might come back at any moment.”

“Then you must hide. Hurry, the time is short.” We found her a niche outside the main hall and she huddled into it, pale in the moonlight and the shadows from the hall.

“Be strong,” I said to her; “be brave, Artemisia. I’ll find this Lucius, and all may yet be well.”