Terez had leaped up from her seat and was glowering at him, body rigid. 'You heartless brute—' she began to hiss.

'We may both wholeheartedly wish it were otherwise!' he roared over her, 'but we are married! The time to raise objections to my parentage, or my person, or to any other facet of our situation, was before you became Queen of the Union! Despise me all you wish, Terez, but you… go… nowhere.' And Jezal swept the dumbstruck ladies with a baleful glare, turned on his polished heel and stalked from the airy salon.

Damn it but his hand hurt.

The Circle

« ^ »

Dawn was coming, a grey rumour, the faintest touch of brightness around the solemn outline of the walls of Carleon. The stars had all faded into a stony sky, but the moon still hung there, just above the tree-tops, seeming almost close enough to try an arrow at.

West had not closed his eyes all night, and had passed into that strange realm of twitchy, dreamlike wakefulness that comes beyond exhaustion. Some time in the silent darkness, after all the orders had been given, he had sat by the light of a single lamp to write a letter to his sister. To vomit up excuses. To demand forgiveness. He had sat, he could not have said for how long, with the pen over the paper, but the words had simply not come. He had wanted to say all that he felt, but when it came to it, he felt nothing. The warm taverns of Adua, cards in the sunny courtyard. Ardee's one-sided smile. It all seemed a thousand years ago.

The Northmen were already busy, clipping at the grass in the shadow of the walls, the clicking of their shears a strange echo of the gardeners in the Agriont, shaving a circle a dozen strides across down to the roots. The ground, he supposed, on which the duel would take place. The ground where, in no more than an hour or two, the fate of the North would be decided. Very much like a fencing circle, except that it might soon be sprayed with blood.

'A barbaric custom,' muttered Jalenhorm, his thoughts evidently taking a similar course.

'Really?' growled Pike. 'I was just now thinking what a civilised one it is.'

'Civilised? Two men butchering each other before a crowd?'

'Better than a whole crowd butchering each other. A problem solved with only one man killed? That's a war ended well, to my mind.'

Jalenhorm shivered and blew into his cupped hands. 'Still. A lot to hang on two men fighting one another. What if Ninefingers loses?'

'Then I suppose that Bethod will go free,' said West, unhappily.

'But he invaded the Union! He caused the deaths of thousands! He deserves to be punished!'

'People rarely get what they deserve.' West thought of Prince Ladisla's bones rotting out in the wasteland. Some terrible crimes go unpunished, and a few, for no reason beyond the fickle movements of chance, are richly rewarded. He stopped in his tracks.