The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [89]
He felt a bit of fear but even more exhilaration. At last, a duel worth fighting.
He feinted low and finished high, but Acredo retreated a step, put Caspator in a bind, and lunged. Cazio felt the tension run up his blade, and then, with a sudden dismaying ring of steel, Caspator finally snapped.
Acredo paused, then came on. Cursing, Cazio retreated, holding the stub of his old friend.
He was steeling himself for a last, desperate leap inside Acredo’s sword point in hopes of grappling him, when the Sefry suddenly gasped and fell to one knee. Cazio’s first thought was that it might be some odd gambit like the three-legged dog, but then he saw the arrow sprouting from the man’s thigh.
“No!” Cazio shouted.
But men-at-arms were swarming along the canal now. Acredo defiantly lifted his weapon again, but an archer shot him from five kingsyards, hitting him in the shoulder, and in the very next instant a third shaft struck through his throat.
He clapped his hand to the wound and looked straight at Cazio. He tried to say something, but blood bubbled from his lips instead, and he fell face forward in the snow.
Cazio looked up in anger and saw Sir Neil. The knight was without armor, though he was a bit better dressed than Cazio, still wearing a white shirt, breeches, and, most enviable of all, buskins.
“Sir Neil!” Cazio cried. “We were dueling! He should not have died like that!”
“This rubbish stabbed Her Majesty,” Neil replied, “in a cold-blooded assassination attempt. He does not deserve the honor of a duel or any sort of honorable death.”
He glanced down at Acredo.
“I did wish to take him alive, however, to discover who sent him.” He gave Cazio a hard glance. “This isn’t sport,” he said. “If you believe that it is—if your love of the duel is more important than Anne’s safety—then I wonder if you belong in her company.”
“If I had not been here, she would be dead,” Cazio replied.
“Fair enough,” Neil said. “But my point still stands, I think.”
Cazio acknowledged that with a curt nod.
Cazio picked up the Sefry’s fallen blade. It had a beautiful balance but was a bit lighter than Caspator.
“I will take care of your weapon, dessrator,” he told the fallen man. “I only wish I had earned it fairly.”
Someone placed a cloak over Cazio’s shoulders, and he realized he was shivering almost uncontrollably. It also occurred to him that he was being stupid, that Sir Neil was right.
But he could not shake the feeling that no matter what a villain he had been, any dessrator deserved to die by the point of a rapier.
“Sit me up,” Anne commanded.
Just saying the words was almost enough to cause her to faint.
“You should lie back,” Elyoner’s leic said. He was a young man, handsome in a feminine way. Anne wondered just how much medicine he knew that didn’t have anything to do with sex. He had stopped her bleeding and put something on her arm that caused it to throb a little less violently, but that was no guarantee she wasn’t going to die of sepsis in a few days.
“I will sit up, against the pillows,” she said.
“As Her Majesty wishes.”
He helped her to that position.
“I need something to drink,” Anne said.
“You heard her,” Elyoner said. Her aunt was in a violet dressing gown of a complex weave whose name Anne didn’t know. She looked drunk and worried.
More interesting was Austra, who was wearing nothing more than a bedcover pulled tightly around her shoulders. She had appeared only instants after Cazio had left; that was suggestive, since Cazio had been entirely naked.
“Austra, put something on,” she said gently.
Austra nodded gratefully and vanished into the adjoining wardrobe.
A moment later, a young girl with hair in yellow ringlets wearing an umber skirt and a red apron appeared with a cup of what turned out to be watered wine. Anne quaffed it thirstily, her distaste for alcohol a thing of the past.
The girl went to Elyoner and whispered