Page 16 of The Summer War

But it was a hard choice to make, and harder all the next day, watching Argent fighting one summer knight after another, knowing that she could save his life with a single step over that edge.

It would have been easier not to watch, but she’d spent so many days in the stands at Todholme watching him fight that she could see the fighting in her head just from the sound.

And by then the summerlings were all applauding wildly after every match, and catching their breath in horrified gasps whenever Argent was in the worst danger, so even if Celia hadn’t watched, she would have known every time he was almost about to die.

Instead the only thing that made it easier was Elithyon’s growing unhappiness.

In the thirteenth match of the morning, Argent fought a knight who had two swords that turned into four and then six, wielded in arms that came springing out of his shoulders like mirror images, and made a whirling cloud of death all around him as a shield.

Argent couldn’t come at him, and every time he tried, the summer knight answered as quick as lightning, his swords darting in and out.

He drew first blood, and second blood, carving slashes through Argent’s mail on both his arms, to cries of horror, and then twice more on each of his thighs, blood streaming like thin banners as Argent twisted away, just barely avoiding a mortal blow.

Even as Celia almost cried out to say she’d jump, to stop it, Elithyon lurched up from his throne as if he meant to protest, but before either of them could say anything, Argent had continued the movement and come up from under that swinging blade close in to the other knight’s body, so close inside his guard they were almost in an embrace, driving a dagger up beneath his ribs.

Argent let the knight slide off him to the ground.

His head was hanging with fatigue, and blood was still trickling down into puddles around his feet, and dripping from his wrists.

Elithyon didn’t even have to declare the halt before the summerlings were already hurrying to Argent with fine bandages of pure undyed silk, but he sent his own cupbearer to bring him a flagon from inside the palace, and from it he filled a drinking horn to the brim with a drink that glowed with shimmers of gold and silver, and carried it to Argent himself.

When Argent drank it, the red stains stopped spreading through the wraps.

Elithyon stood looking at him and said, “Withdraw your challenge, and the sorceress will live out her mortal days in comfort; she will have food and drink befitting of her rank, and I will even have servants attend her, to see to her needs,” as if he were at a negotiating table, bargaining for Argent’s life, and he sounded as desperate to save it as Celia felt herself.

That didn’t make it easier to watch Argent straightening up to hand back the cup, and saying steadily, “No,” before he turned and went to his pavilion, to get ready to keep fighting his way to the death ahead of him.

But it did make it easier for Celia to forgive Elithyon when he bowed his head in misery at Argent’s back.

His sorrow cooled the hot resentment inside her like a breath of autumn air through the windows of Castle Todholme, and when he turned and glared up at her in a rage, his fists clenched, she didn’t glare back at him.

She looked at him and didn’t try to hide her own grief: a terrible fate they had to endure together.

His own fury quenched as he stared up at her, as if he saw something in her face he didn’t understand.

He sat with grim resignation all the next day, and after Argent went to rest with seventy-eight summerling knights dead by the side of the courtyard, higher than any of the songmakers had guessed after the first night, Elithyon came up the tower stair and burst into her chamber and stood over her where she sat curled on the stones by the edge of the window, watching Argent oiling his mail for the next day.

“Do you imagine even he can win your freedom?” he said savagely.

“Never have I seen such valor, but it cannot bring him victory in this challenge. He may slay a hundred of my knights, but what good will it do you? A hundred hundred more will come forth willingly to face him in the court. End this. I will let you speak to him. Tell him that you wish him to accept the bargain. You will have food and drink, and service—”

He stopped there a moment, but then in the pavilion, Argent got up to put his sword on the rack, and the step he took was limping, even though Elithyon had given him another silver-gold draught at the end of the night.

Elithyon saw it, and he clenched his fists by his sides and bit out, “You will have more chambers here in the tower, garments befitting a queen as well, and each night among your dreams you will walk among the gardens. Will this not satisfy you better than to sit here and cower, clinging to a miserable existence that will last you only long enough to wither the most shining flower of knighthood that ever my realm has seen?”

She stood up and faced him and held out her hand. “Take off the ring, you with your ten thousand knights at your back, before you call me a coward.”

He glared at her over it, his jaw tight. “You are determined, then, to see him die for your sake?” he said in cold disgust. “To waste such courage and strength and honor, for no reason?”

And she knew it wasn’t any use, but Elithyon had known the same thing, and he’d tried anyway; she had to bargain for Argent’s life too, if she had any chance at all.

So she said, “Let me tell him that I don’t want to be avenged.

If he’ll agree to go, and forget about me, I’ll jump.

” Only even as she said it, she couldn’t help but think of the curse, the curse that had so twisted Argent’s life.

If she was dead, it would weigh on him forever. But she couldn’t help asking anyway.

Elithyon stared at her, bewildered. He said, “ Not avenge you—” and stopped, as if he couldn’t make any sense of the request.

“Argent won’t die for my sake,” Celia said. “I’ll be dead a minute after he is. But then this war you’ve made will be over for good, and the people of Prosper will be able to sleep in summer. And that’s worth dying for. But he doesn’t have to die, if he’ll just let it end here—”

“No,” Elithyon said, interrupting her. He’d drawn back from her as she spoke, his face going blank with the dismay of someone realizing he’d misunderstood an enemy, and now he broke in and shook his head almost fiercely.

“No.” He stopped a moment, and said in almost a whisper, “Eislaing too loved her people, and the quiet folk. But if she had asked such a thing of me, to let her die unavenged, forgotten, could I have granted her plea? It would have been only a bitter sorrow to know that, in her final hour, I caused her any grief. Why should you wound him so?” He turned and left her in the room, and she didn’t try to argue with him. She knew that he was right.

But she also knew, before the end of the next morning, that it was Argent’s final day, and hers.

He’d recovered after the night’s rest, but his strength slipped away a little more quickly.

And after she’d watched him fight and kill thirteen more summer knights, she ate an extra piece of bread, even though she’d only been letting herself have one each day.

She was hungry, and there wasn’t any sense in suffering any more than she was going to anyway.

The summerlings knew, also. They’d stopped applauding after the victories; they were all silent now instead.

When the midday halt came, the servants went to Argent and tended him gently, speaking in low voices as they guided him back to his pavilion.

He’d been wounded five times that morning.

Elithyon watched from his throne with his face hopeless, and even looked up at her in misery instead of rage, as if he wanted to see someone sharing his grief.

She met his gaze; she wanted the same thing.

She was so glad that it would hurt him when Argent died.

She was glad to think that he’d have to remember this as the end of the story he’d written for his sister: not a triumph, but a tragedy.

And then the sun crept over the sky, much too quick, and Argent came back to the courtyard.

He fought and killed nine knights, but the ninth one put a blade through his side, front to back, even as he fell, and afterwards Argent sank to his knees in the courtyard, pressing a hand to the wound.

Elithyon jerked a gesture and sent servants in to dress the wound, and let his head fall into his hand.

Around the courtyard, all the summer knights who’d been so eager to fight before were edging back instead, as if none of them wanted to be the one to come in and strike what all of them could see would be a mere executioner’s blow.

Celia had stood up, her hands clenched, involuntarily.

She looked at the edge, and thought again about jumping.

But after the wound had been bound up tight, Argent looked up at her and smiled again, more familiar than he had been ever since the day he’d first ridden away from home to go to the summer games.

Lightness and ease had come back into his face; the hard desperate grip he’d had on himself suddenly unclenched.

“It’s all right, Celie,” he said. “Don’t worry,” and she understood at last what he was telling her.

This was his own way around the curse: a way to die for love, instead of glory.

Something that was worth dying for, to him.