“No, No, Mandor. It’s not…not courteous…” The hand, my hand, was slapped away by an armored glove, struck so violently that it lay bleeding upon the table before drunken-Peter while the other me watched, watched.
The King called again. “Is it not forbidden to call challenge during Festival or in a Schooltown, Mandor? Have you not learned it so?
Answered by crowing laughter. “Many things are forbidden, Mertyn. Many things. Still, we do them.”
“True. Well, if you would have it so, Prince¾then have it so. I move.”
And from behind one of the crystal fountains which had hidden him from us came that lonely Sorcerer I had wondered at, striding into the light until he stood just behind the King, full of silent waiting, clear as glass, holding whatever terrible thing he had been given to hold.
Drunken-Peter felt Mandor stiffen, saw the armored hand clench with an audible clang. Drunken-Peter looked up to see sweat bead the Prince’s forehead, to see a vein beating beside a glaring eye. From the Sorcerer below light began to well upward, a force as impersonal as water building behind a dam. Peter-who-watched knew the force would be unleashed at the next move. Drunken-Peter knew nothing, only sat dizzy and half sick before the puddled wine and remnants of the feast as Prince Mandor stooped above him to say:
“Peter…I do not wish to be…discourteous…” The voice hummed with tension, cracked with strain. With what enormous effort did he then make it light and caressing? “Go down and tell Gamesmaster Mertyn I did but…jest. Invite him to have wine with us…” Peter-who-watched screamed silently above. Drunken-Peter staggered to his feet, struggled into a jog past the tall Demon, imagining as he went an expression of¾was it scorn? on that face below the half helm, then down the long flight of stairs toward the garden, lurching, mouth open, eyes fixed upon Gamesmaster Mertyn, onto the red-washed pave, hearing from above the cry of frustrated fury, “Talisman…to King’s Blood Four.”
Peter-above saw the power strike. Drunken-Peter cried as he fell, “No. No, Mandor. You would not be so false to me…to me…” before the darkness fell.
I woke in a tower room, a strange room, narrow windows showing me clouds driven across a gray sky. It hurt to move my head. At the bedside Chance sat, dozing, and my movement wakened him. He hrummed and hruphed himself into consciousness.
“Feel better? Well then, you wouldn’t know whether you do or not, would you? You wouldn’t even know how lucky you are.”
“I’m not…dead. I should be dead.”
“Indeed you should. Sacrificed in the play, like a pawn, dead as a pantry mouse under the claws of the cat. You would be, too, except for this.”
He picked my ragged jacket from the floor, holding it so that I could see what the rents revealed, a tracery of golden thread and silver wire, winking red eyes of tiny gems set into the circuits of stitchery in the lining.
“He bade Nitch sew this into your jacket. Just in case.”
“How did he know? I don’t understand…”
“It would be hard to understand,” said Chance, “except by one long mired in treachery. Ah. But Mertyn is not young, lad. He has seen much and studied more. He saw those ribbons, and he knew. Oh, if they’d been a few colorful tilings such as any friend might give, he’d have understood. A love gift, after all. But those you had? Nothing else like them in the town? What purpose a gift like that?”
“I thought he gave them to me so that he would know me among all the other maskers…”
“Then you saw deep, lad, and didn’t know it.”
“Did he mean to play me, even then?” I cried in my belly, a hard knot of pain there which hurt more than the fire beneath the bandages on my face and arms.
Chance shrugged, leaned to smooth my pillow. “Do you students know what you will play before the game begins? You set your pieces out in the game box, all shining, the ones you think you’ll play and the ones you hold in reserve. Maybe he brought you along to see him win. But, he wasn’t strong enough to win against the King, and he wasn’t brave enough to stand against the move and bear the play as it came, so he threw you into the game like a bone to a Fustigar.”