The Prize in the Game (35 page)

There was only ever one way to stop Maga, one person who could stop her. She had to find her father.

Maga's smile reminded her only too well of the last time their parents had been at war with each other. Allel could stop her, though it wouldn't be easy even for him.

"Do we have a betrothal tonight?" Maga asked at last.

Cethern let go of his beard, which he had been tugging gently. He looked at Ferdia, who was staring at the grass at his feet. Cethern did not quite shake his head. He turned to Elenn, who was standing perfectly still and quiet but whose face was now running with tears. "We do," he said, and he sounded thirty years older than he had before.

Elenn bowed to Cethern, who bowed back gravely. Then she put out her hand to Ferdia, who took it and held it tightly.

"Tonight after the funerals, then," Maga said.

The sunset, the funerals, and the betrothal passed in a haze for Emer. Allel was there, but she could not hope to have him alone for a moment. There was plenty of food afterward, for once; fresh supplies must have come from somewhere. Ferdia did not seem to have much appetite. Elenn kept looking at him, but he rarely met her eyes. Allel too kept very quiet, drinking with Cethern and Lew of Anlar, who seemed to be a permanent addition to their dinner group now.

Elenn and Ferdia led the first dance. Most people seemed to be wild and enthusiastic in the firelight. Emer waited until the second dance, which was one anyone could dance, men together, women together, even children with parents. She grabbed Allel's hand and pulled him up. "Dance with me, Father," she said. Their eyes were on a level now, as they had not been when last they had danced together.

"There are plenty of younger people who would be only too pleased to dance with you," he complained and gestured to Lew, who smiled. Lew could hardly be used to being called young.

"Oh, please, come on," she said, not letting go of her father's hand.

Allel sighed and shrugged and followed her as if he had no choice. As soon as they were far enough away from the others, with enough dancers between them and Maga that they couldn't be seen or heard, she stopped and took both his hands. "You must stop Mother doing this to Elenn."

"I can't," he said, freeing his hands and gesturing with them as if to ward her off. "I promised."

"Promised who? What? Why?"

Allel looked wretched. "Promised Maga I wouldn't interfere."

"Wouldn't interfere with what?" Getting him to talk tonight was like teasing out a sea anemone with a piece of seaweed.

Allel sighed and looked around as if for help. Everyone around them was moving in the dance.

Nobody was even looking at them. "I shouldn't tell you."

"I have kept your secrets before, even at cost to myself," Emer said, which was a truth Allel had to acknowledge. "I can't see what you can have promised that would stop you helping Elenn."

"Well, but make sure this doesn't go any farther," he said. "Maga said she could bring the whole island together to conquer Oriel, and conquer it, right to the northern sea, before the Feast of Lew and the harvest. If she does, she has dominion over me, and if she does not, I have dominion over hermdashno more fighting between us in either case. But I must not interfere. I
Page 130

promised I would leave her alone to do what she wanted to arrange it."

"This entire war, all this craziness, is a war between the two of you?" Emer's voice shook with anger. She felt almost drunk with it.

"I didn't think she could possibly do it," Allel said. "You know what she can be like."

"I know what she can be like, and if you can't resist her, how much less can we? Have you thought what this is doing to Elenn?" Emer glared at her father.

"They have all of them been good men, and good marriages," Allel said. "Maga is trying to win, yes, but she has a care for you children as well. She wouldn't hurt you to try to win."

"I don't know how you can be so blind and stupid," Emer burst out. "Do you know she has been trying to marry me to Lew ap Ross?"

"He is the king of Anlar, and he has no heir," Allel said uncertainly.

"He is forty-five years old at least, and he is Conal's uncle!"

"I spoke to her for you, for Conal," Allel said, much more confidently. "She made him an offer and he wouldn't take it. She may have suggested Lew, but she hasn't forced him on you. He wouldn't be a bad match in many ways. Yes, he's older, but he's a good man."

What Emer wanted to say to that would have taken all night, and it was irrelevant anyway. "I am not going to marry him. I am going to marry Conal. But what about Elenn? Do you know she loves Ferdia, and Ferdia doesn't love her, and Maga has somehow forced him into fighting, even though he is young, Darag's best friend, and nothing like as good as Darag?"

"I didn't know he didn't love her," Allel said. "Butmdash"

"She has seen four good husbands die for her, and three dozen good men die trying to win her, and now she is going to see the man she loves die just like them, under Darag's spears. You have to stop this. Whatever you promised, you have to stop Maga. She is completely out of control, and nobody else has ever had any way of checking her."

"I promised," Allel said, moving aside to let a pair of hurtling dancers pass them. "If I get in her way, she will call it interference and call the whole thing off. She hasn't forced you or Elenn to marry anyone. Ferdia is

Cethern's son, not mine. It's not my responsibility if he's fighting people who are better than he is."

"And you'll let Elenn break her heart like that?"

"She has agreed to it, and so has he. Maga may have suggested these men to Elenn, but Elenn has accepted them. Making marriage alliances is a reasonable thing for a king to do."

He hesitated. "Or a queen."

"She's agreed to let you be king if she loses?" Emer was horrified.

Allel looked uncomfortable. The music stopped, but he led Emer out of the way as another couple-dance began. "I'm of the Royal Kin the same as she is. We were both chosen, in a way," he said, in a tone of justification.

Emer had been taught by Inis for a year, and by ap Fial for years before that. "You know better than that, Father," she said. "Kingship is not something to be passed from hand to hand like an arm-ring. It is a sacred trust, and what's more, she just won't give it up."

"She swore she would, if she lost."

Emer was silent for a moment, amid the noise of the harps and drums and dancers leaping in the firelight.

"Then maybe she will," she said. "But she should not. The gods will not permit it."

"The gods are showing every sign so far of being on your mother's side," Allel said.

"I'm sure Damona the Just isn't," Emer said, stretching her fingers as she said the holy name.

Allel frowned. "They are not my concern. If I come to be king, I will stand between them and the people then.

Now, that is for Maga."

Page 131

"Is the chance of kingship so much for you that you will risk my happiness and Elenn's and Mingor's, if need be, for the chance of it? You know there are no children in marriage without love. And all of this is hurting

Elenn more than she can bear."

"It's not your happiness, and love grows in marriage," he said uncomfortably. Emer knew then that this was hopeless, that he would not help her. He could be as stubborn as Maga when he was put to it. He had always resented Maga for being chosen king when he was the war-leader. "It is my promise. Anything I say she will see as interference. And besides, you exaggerate. Elenn is very young. She will recover. Or maybe Ferdia will beat Darag and open the road."

"I always thought I could trust you," she said, feeling that assurance slip away. The world seemed colder without it. As a child, Maga had never been fair, but Allel always had, when she could attract his attention.

"I haven't told her you're driving Darag's chariot," Allel said, smiling placatingly.

"You know?" This was another, even colder, shock.

"Did you really think a scarf would hide you from your own father?"

"Who else knows?"

"Nobody." Allel smiled. "I haven't told anyone, and I have stifled speculation whenever I can. When people have talked about it, I have suggested that it is ap Ringabur the lawspeaker, in disguise because she should not stand among the fighting folk of Oriel."

"And why didn't you tell anyone?"

"I wanted Darag to hold. I don't want Maga to win." Allel laughed.

"Then you are not even keeping your promise," Erner said, despising him. There had to be another way out, even if he had failed her.

"Not telling isn't intervening. She can't know I knew, and even if she did, it isn't the same as trying to stop her plans," Allel protested.

Emer looked at him and saw not her kind and powerful father, but a tired, greedy man, past middle age, his

hair thinning on top. "Elenn thinks that those people are dying for her," she said. "She'll live with that burden her whole life. I am helping Darag to kill them, and they are my kin and my friends. I will have to live with that.

But you don't understand, and you should. They're dying for you, you and Maga are killing those good people.

And the same would hold if there had been no curse, if there had been a war with battles in the normal way of things. The weight of the souls of everyone who dies in this war falls on you and Maga because you are both so selfish and so caught up in your own personal war that you can't see how terrible it is to fight that war with other people's lives. If words were not wounding enough, could you not have taken up swords, or staves, or snowballs in winter as we did in Muin, or wrestled in the mud for supremacy? It would have better become the dignity of the kingdom of Connat than this."

Allel stood speechless as she turned and walked away. She was shaking with anger and tiredness, and she went back toward her tent. She did not know if Elenn would be sleeping there tonight or if she would go with

Ferdia. She hoped her sister might at least have one good night with the man she loved to remember afterwards. Thinking of Ferdia's face, she did not think so. If he loved anyone, it was Darag. Maybe Elenn loved him because he didn't love her, he didn't press her to love him, like all the others. She hoped he would be kind. He would die tomorrow, there wasn't any way around it. He would die, and Elenn and Darag would break their hearts, and she couldn't do anything to stop it, because the only alternative was Darag dying, with
Page 132

Conal and all the folk of Oriel after him.

As she went into the tent, she tripped over the pile of bloody clothes. She pushed them outside wearily. Then she went out again and put them carefully out of the way, at the side of the tent where Elenn would not trip over them coming back. It wasn't much to do for her sister, all things considered.

Inside the tent once more, finally able to close her eyes, she was too tired to sleep. She kept running over the argument with her father, thinking of better things she might have said, hearing again his denial of her happiness as a thing of importance compared to his own power. She had always loved her father. Still, she had Conal. Conal had said he would go away with her. He did not care more about power. He could be trusted. She tried not to think of Conal's face riven with pain, but to remember the feel of his arms around her.

She remembered the nights they had had together, just sleeping, the comfort of the warmth of his body. She counted them, recalling the feel of each, in Edar at the Feast of Bel, in the Isles, on the road, in Muin, the whole blessed month in Muin. Recalling Conal in Muin, at last she felt sleep close over her head like deep water.

Sometime later, she became aware that Elenn and Beauty had come into the tent, and that Elenn was weeping. "Elenn?" she asked, trying to pull herself up out of sleep.

"Go to sleep," Elenn said, her voice full of misery and resentment.

Without opening her eyes, Emer turned and reached over to her sister. She opened her arms and embraced

Elenn, who was stiff for a moment and then hugged her back. For a little while, they held each other as they had when they were tiny children and their parents had been quarreling. "Go to sleep," Elenn said again at last, this time affectionately. "I think you are still asleep."

"Mmm," Emer agreed. "You go to sleep, too." She let her sister push her into her own space and pull the blanket up and held sleep off until she heard Elenn lie down. Then she went back to sleep, a wonderful healing sleep that brought her the dream that showed her the way out she had thought impossible.

28

(FERDIA)

The sun was shining, the trees were green, and under them was a twilight-blue haze of bluebells, scenting the air even out onto the road where Ferdia's chariot was hurtling at what felt like breakneck pace towards the ford. He wished they would go even faster so he really would break his neck before they got there.

Ferdia was ready to die, but he wished he could do it without having to see Darag's face. He couldn't pretend

Darag wouldn't mind killing him, however many other champions he had killed. He straightened himself with a hand at the side of the chariot. The banner of Lagin with its green hill spread out behind him. His spears were ready to his hand. It should have been a glorious first ride to war.

When they sang about it afterwards, nobody would be able to tell he was only here because he was afraid.

His charioteer shot him a quick glance. "It's not too late to change your mind," she said. He shook his head at her. She was not really his charioteer but Cethern's comfortable old Pell, who had first taught him to harness horses and how to stand in a chariot.

"Oh yes it is," he said, glancing behind them. They were leading the way. Behind them came the other people who planned to challenge Darag that day, after Ferdia fell, and behind them, that part of the army of