Footsteps crossed the deck behind him, cutting against the rhythm of Lancelot’s steady advance and retreat. Then a light, utterly distinctive voice spoke clearly.
“My lord Lancelot, if it would please you, I think I might test you somewhat better than your shadow,” said Diarmuid dan Ailell.
Paul turned. Lancelot, perspiring slightly, regarded Diarmuid with grave courtesy in his face and bearing. “I should be grateful for it,” he said, with a gentle smile. “It has been a long time since I faced someone with a sword. Have you wooden ones then, training swords aboard ship?”
It was Diarmuid’s turn to smile, eyes dancing under the fair hair bleached even paler by the sun overhead. It was an expression most of the men aboard knew very well. “Unfortunately not,” he murmured, “but I would hazard that we are both skilled enough to use our blades without doing harm.” He paused. “Serious harm,” he amended.
There was a little silence, broken by a third voice, from farther up the deck. “Diarmuid, this is hardly the time for games, let alone dangerous ones.”
The tone of command in Loren Silvercloak’s voice was, if anything, even stronger since the mage had ceased to be a mage. He looked and spoke with undiminished authority, with, it seemed, a clearer sense of purpose, ever since the moment Matt had been brought back from his death and Loren had vowed himself to the service of his old friend, who had been King under Banir Lok before he was source to a mage in Paras Derval.
At the same time, the ambit of his authority—of anyone’s, for that matter—seemed always to come to a sharp terminus at the point where Diarmuid’s own wishes began. Especially this kind of wish. Against his will, Paul’s mouth crooked upward as he gazed at the Prince. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Erron and Rothe handing slips of paper to Carde. Wagers. He shook his head bemusedly.
Diarmuid drew his sword. “We are at sea,” he said to Loren with exaggerated reasonableness, “and at least a day’s sailing, perhaps more, depending on the winds and our marginally competent captain”—a fleeting glance spared for Coll, shiftless at the helm—“from reaching land. There may never be a more felicitous occasion for play. My lord?”
The last question was directed at Lancelot, with a salute of the sword, angled in such a way that the sun glinted from it into Lancelot’s eyes—who laughed unaffectedly, returned the salute, and moved neatly to the side, his own blade extended.
“For the sacred honor of the Black Boar!” Diarmuid said loudly, to whistles and cheers. He flourished his steel with a motion of wrist and shoulder.
“For my lady, the Queen,” said Lancelot automatically.
It shaped an immediate stillness. Paul looked instinctively toward the prow. Arthur stood gazing outward toward where land would be, quite oblivious to all of them. After a moment, Paul turned back, for the blades had touched, ritually, and were dancing now.
He’d never seen Diarmuid with a sword. He’d heard the stories about both of Ailell’s sons, but this was his initial encounter at first hand and, watching, he learned something else about why the men of South Keep followed their Prince with such unwavering loyalty. It was more than just the imagination and zest that could conjure moments like this out of a grim ship on a wide sea. It was the uncomplicated truth—in a decidedly complex man—that he was unnervingly good at everything he did. Including swordplay, Paul now saw, with no surprise at all.
The surprise, though thinking about it later Paul would wonder at his unpreparedness, was how urgently the Prince was struggling, from the first touch of blades, to hold his own.
For this was Lancelot du Lac, and no one, ever, had been as good.
With the same economic, almost abstract precision with which he had dueled his shadow, the man who had lain in a chamber undersea among the mightiest dead in all the worlds showed the men of Prydwen why.
They were using naked blades and moving very fast on a swaying ship. To Paul’s untutored eye there was real danger in the thrusts and cuts they leveled at each other.