The Prize in the Game Read online

  “It seems I will,” Atha said and bowed.

  It seemed that Conal wanted to speak to every surviving farmer of Edar, and every champion of Oriel wanted to speak to him. Emer was happy enough to sit quietly and drink water and eat some bread and honey ap Anla brought her. She still felt far away from ordinary concerns. It wasn’t until Conary suggested she ride back to Ardmachan that she woke up properly.

  “I will drive Conal,” she said.

  “I don’t mind if you want to rest,” Conal said. Now that the battle was over, he looked exhausted.

  “I want to drive you,” she repeated. “I know we wrecked the chariot, but there must be another we can use.”

  “The horses will be eaten at the victory feast,” the steward assured her. His arm was bound up. She hoped they could find the weapon and heal him properly. “We will all honor them, and you. We also honor the generosity of King Conary for leaving the captives with us.”

  Emer smiled at him, and he bowed. She could see the straggle of leftover raiders being brought into the dun. They looked sullen and resigned. Serving at Edar for the season was not at all what they had expected when they had left home. It was so near the beginning of the season, too; it would be months before they got back to the Isles.

  “I still want to drive,” Emer said.

  “The warriors can make space,” Finca said, meaning that some of them could go back three to a chariot. “You can drive my son if you want to.”

  Conary looked as if he was about to protest, but bit it back.

  Conal and Emer took their place in the array of champions. Not far from them they could see Atha getting in beside Meithin. Emer laughed quietly.

  “What?” Conal asked.

  “Yesterday I’d have been so proud to be here, but today we are the only ones who have fought. We won the battle ourselves.”

  “Along with the farmers and the cows,” Conal said. “Twelve farmers were killed, though no cows were either taken or harmed.”

  “And how many raiders?” Emer asked.

  “Around thirty, many of them trampled,” Conal said. “Garth brought me eleven heads he says are mine. One of them is yours, the big man you killed with the knife. I told Garth, and he will send it to you when it is ready.”

  There had not been time in the battle for Emer even to think about taking his head. “How very kind,” she said. “I should have thanked him.” She looked around. The steward was over by the gates now.

  “It was your kill,” Conal said. “And Garth understands that you were recovering from your wound. I thanked him for you. And indeed, he would hardly take a word of thanks. Edar will do well from this raid, when it could have done very badly, and Garth and Anla both know it.”

  Then Conary came over to them. “You both did very well indeed,” he said. “I am proud of you. You did everything you could have, except maybe you could have tried to set fire to the ships to stop them getting away.”

  “I didn’t think of that,” Conal said.

  “Nobody can think of everything. You might have sent Meithin off and held Atha negotiating and boasting for long enough, but it might not have worked.”

  “I didn’t think Atha would agree to fight me,” he said. “She wouldn’t fight someone she’d never heard of and when there weren’t any other champions present.”

  “She didn’t have a chariot,” Emer put in.

  Conary looked at her, startled. “I wasn’t suggesting that you fight her, just exchanged challenges and boasts to buy time, establishing that it was a raid, not a feud, speaking of a champion who would fight, meaning when we came up.”

  Emer met his eyes. “Conal held her off for a long time,” she said proudly. “They stopped fighting because the herd came back, but he might have won.”

  “I wouldn’t have,” Conal said, and shrugged. “She’s too good for me yet. But if I keep practicing—”

  Conary laughed. “You did very well. And what you did with the bull was inspired. It was a great risk, but anything was a risk. You saved the herd and the farm. What you did worked, that’s the most important thing.” Conary embraced Conal then, and went to his own chariot.

  They set off back to Ardmachan. The fields seemed very brightly green and the hawthorn blossom on the hedgerows almost unnaturally white. Emer felt as if she had run a hundred miles. Conal stood still beside her. “Conary’s really pleased,” he said after a while, as if he was turning the thought over in his mind.

  “He ought to be,” Emer said indignantly. “It’s about time people started to appreciate you instead of making a fuss over Darag all the time.”

  Conal laughed. “Darag came and congratulated me while you were dozing under the tree. So did Leary. Leary used to be my friend, you know.”

  “Good for them,” Emer said. “And your mother smiled. Maybe even your father will realize you’ve done something good.”

  Conal’s smile was crooked. “No, I’m fairly sure my father will be angry that I endangered the herd by getting them to stampede and furious that you broke his second-best spare sword.”

  12

  (FERDIA)

  It doesn’t matter,” Darag said. He threw his last spear at the target and without even looking, flung himself facedown in the grass.

  Ferdia had to bite his lip to stop himself from complaining about it again anyway. He wanted to murder Conal. Everything he had done had been foolhardy at best and outright demented at worst. He had not only got away with it, but had won a praise name and was getting everyone’s attention. And the rest of them hadn’t even had a chance to fight. By the time they got there, it was all over. But try to suggest that a stampeding herd of cattle wasn’t a legitimate weapon of war and not even Atha would agree with you. Even now, a month later, Ferdia couldn’t leave it alone. He straightened his own last spear and looked at the target, where Darag’s spear quivered a hairsbreadth from his other two spears, right through the throat of the champion-shaped target. One of Ferdia’s spears pierced it through the gut, and the other stuck ignominiously in the turf low and to the left of the marked figure. He hadn’t done as badly as this for years; it was as if he had completely lost the knack.

  Down on the other side of the practice field, Nid and Leary had their chariot out and were endlessly turning and passing in front of another target. At least he could still do that right, he’d been practicing that enough. Everyone else had gone off to play hurley, but Darag had stayed to help Ferdia with his spears. The excited cries of the hurley players could be heard faintly. Ferdia looked back at his target. “Conal,” Ferdia said in his heart as he aimed. The spear went straight and landed just above Darag’s trio.

  “Ha!” he said.

  Darag sat up and looked. “Oh, much better, yes, well done,” he said warmly. “You’re getting it again.” Ferdia smiled at the praise. “Sit down for a moment.”

  He sat down beside Darag and looked at his friend as he sprawled on the grass, dappled by the leaf-shadow and sunlight. Darag smiled up at him lazily, then rolled onto his back and stared up through the aspen leaves at the sky. “The thing is,” he said, “Conal has always felt he’s competing with me.”

  “He is competing with you,” Ferdia said. Darag never took it seriously enough.

  “Well, in some ways he is,” Darag conceded. “But if he is, I keep on winning. I don’t mean I don’t want to win when we fight. I do, of course I do. I want to be the best, and I’m glad I am. But it’s the same to me if I beat Conal or you or Leary or anyone. I just want to win, it isn’t personal. But it is for Conal. Conal thinks we’re competing even when I don’t want to. He thinks so even when he doesn’t want to, like with Elenn at first. He thinks so much that it ought to really do him good to get a really good win in against somebody else where I wasn’t involved. Now maybe he can stop feeling he’s losing to me with every breath he takes and we can be friends.”

  “You’ve thought about this a lot,” Ferdia said. It wasn’t exactly that he didn’t want Darag to be friends wit
h Conal. It was just that he didn’t think he could ever manage it himself.

  Darag sat up again and looked at Ferdia seriously. “Before you came, Conal and Leary and I were the only ones our age. I had to think about why he doesn’t like me.”

  “But it’s not just competing at practice,” Ferdia said, having worked it out properly now. “Conary’s children are dead, and he had four, so there aren’t going to be any more, even if he gets married again. So when he dies and the people choose between the Royal Kin in your generation, it’s going to be you and Conal and Leary and Orlam they’re choosing between. That’s the prize Conal has his eye on.” It was a prize Conal had come closer to in the last month, Ferdia knew, winning Conary’s approval and a great deal of popularity among the champions. He knew that Darag could have done even better if he had been the one who had had the chance. But now it looked as if there would be no more fighting at all this summer. It wasn’t fair.

  “It wouldn’t matter if Conary’s sons were alive or not, in Oriel,” Darag said, yawning. “They choose the best of all the Royal Kin. Anyone whose grandparent was a king.”

  “Well, in Lagin too,” Ferdia said, delighted that Darag was prepared to talk about it for once. “But in reality my father says it’s perfectly easy for the king to make it really easy for the people to choose by making sure the heir you want is the one who has the experience and the opportunities. He’s doing that for me, so that when he dies I will be the obvious choice to succeed him, the way he was for his uncle. Well, Conary can do that, too. So Conal thinks—”

  “I don’t care,” Darag interrupted.

  Ferdia blinked. “How can you not care?”

  “I decided last winter, before you came. It sometimes seems like everything in my life is doomed, everything happens with a significance I don’t intend. Things happen no matter what I do, no matter what I want. From my birth. Before that, from my conception. Remember the day we took up arms? Like that. Lots of things like that, things that seem to mark me out as special. Dreams, too, strange dreams all the time. I talked to Inis about it, and he said lots of stuff, the way he does. What it amounted to was that I was special, that in lots of worlds I do special things. And I thought all right then, but I’m only going to do what I want to. If that happens, it happens, but I’m not going to help it. I don’t care about that, I can’t. If doom wants me to be king, or war leader, then it’s going to do that whatever I want. So I’ve been doing what I want and being who I want to be, myself.”

  “And what do you want to be?” Ferdia asked.

  “Ah, that’s the question.” Darag paused for a moment, then leaned closer, speaking quietly. Ferdia’s heart beat faster. “I want to have friends. I was always so lonely before you came, and then the girls. Now you’re my friend, and Elenn is, and I’m getting to be better friends with the older champions too, now that I’ve taken up arms and they see me as one of them. Then later, I’d like to marry and have children. I’d bring them up properly, be there to do the things fathers do for their children. Like Ringabur carrying Leary home from the stables on his back when he was small. I think about that sometimes. And I want to be a champion. That’s something I want for myself. I am good. I have a good eye and a good hand, and I want to be better. I want to be good enough that whatever doom has waiting for me I’m good enough to get through it and survive—survive past that, survive to have a life afterwards on the other side of it if I can. Because I want to find out what I want, and what doom wants from me, and get as much as I can of what I want in despite of it.”

  Ferdia thought for a moment, and Darag leaned away again and let him. That was something he really liked about Darag, he didn’t mind Ferdia taking time to get his thoughts in order. He heard a great cheer from the hurley field. Someone must have scored.

  “Inis says that if someone is doomed to do something and they don’t do it, then if it really is doomed, someone else will do it,” he said at last. “He says it doesn’t matter who does it, usually, only there are some things that can’t be stopped from happening. He said most things aren’t doomed at all, even when he’s seen things in other worlds, it’s usually a chance that can be taken or refused.”

  He thought uncomfortably of the Feast of Bel. He kept seeing the dog woman since, with her husband, or with the hunting dogs. She kept smiling at him. He didn’t know how he could ask her name, now, and if he asked anyone else they would just tell him her father’s name so he could address her politely, which wouldn’t help. He pushed the thought of her away resolutely. At the other end of the field Leary made his three attacks perfectly for the first time. “But my father says what you said, to do what you want and not worry about what may be prophesied. Live without looking over your shoulder, he says. And I think that’s the best way, generally. Leave all that to the oracle-priests. Though if you have dreams, I suppose that’s hard.” He stopped, uncertain.

  “They’re not oracle dreams,” Darag said.

  “It can be difficult to ignore even ordinary dreams sometimes,” Ferdia said, from heartfelt experience.

  “Oh yes,” Darag agreed. “Shall we throw another set of spears and then go join the hurley before they finish?” He rose to his feet with his usual grace of movement. Ferdia pulled himself to his feet, feeling clumsy and as if he had said the wrong thing.

  They started walking over to the target to retrieve their spears. “I know I can trust you,” Darag said. “I can talk to you about real things.”

  “Of course,” Ferdia said, his heart overflowing.

  “Do you want to be king of Lagin?” Darag asked as Ferdia was bending down to pull out the one that had missed last time. It left a clear gash in the turf that covered the peat.

  “Yes,” he said, straightening. “Not now, but when my father dies, yes, of course I do. It’s my duty.”

  “If I felt it was my duty to be king of Oriel then maybe I would want to. I’d certainly do it. As it is, I feel it’s a prize Conary is dangling in front of all his nephews, setting us against each other. And it’s actually a false prize, an empty one, disguising the real one. He talks about kingship to all of us, kingship and strategy and never about what the land wants, what the farmers need, the demands of the gods. It’s not just him, it’s his sisters and their husbands as well. Maybe if my mother was alive she’d be just like that, but I like to think she was different.”

  They turned and walked back up the field. “What happened to your mother?” Ferdia asked. He had heard stories about the death of Dechtir ap Inis, of course. The worst of them he had only heard whispered.

  “She died in a chariot accident when I was five,” Darag said, staring straight ahead. “She and Conary were going around the dun, I don’t know if it was practice or if they were going off somewhere. They never got there anyway, never got off the road around. She pitched right over the rail and hit her head on a rock, a godstone beside the road. She cracked her head open and died before anyone could do anything.”

  He gestured southeast, and Ferdia realized he knew the very stone it must be, a looming single stone that stood between the fields and the road.

  “How awful,” Ferdia said, hearing the banality of his words but unable to catch them back.

  “The worst of it is that it was such a freakish accident that some people whisper Conary must have thrown her out. Nobody with any sense has ever believed that. Not only was she his favorite sister and his charioteer, but he was absolutely heartbroken, really inconsolable. I can just remember. People have told me he was even harder hit by her death than when my aunt and cousins died in the plague. He blamed himself—I suppose they must have been going fast for it to have happened. He does have a temper, it’s true, and I can almost imagine him getting angry and hitting her. But can you imagine anyone getting angry enough to throw their charioteer out of the chariot? Anyone at all, let alone Conary?”

  “They’d have to be mad,” Ferdia said, shuddering just thinking about it. “It would risk their own life.”

 
“Not to mention the difficulty of doing it,” Darag said. He gestured with his spear toward Nid and Leary. “Think of the angle you’d have to get.”

  Ferdia looked and on reflection, thought of a couple of ways it would be possible. Just as they straightened out of a turn, if the charioteer wasn’t expecting it, bend and heave. It wouldn’t be easy, and it would certainly be dangerous. He doubted it could be spontaneous, but it was by no means impracticable, assuming you wanted to do it in the first place. The hardest part would be taking the reins just right to avoid crashing after the charioteer was out. He wondered if Conary had crashed. He opened his mouth to ask, then realized suddenly that Darag must have thought about it a lot and wanted very much for it to be impossible.

  “The idea is just the sort of nonsensical gossip people like to pass along,” he said. “They must have been going fast and hit a stone or something in the road when she wasn’t holding on at all.”

  Darag smiled. “That’s what I’ve always thought.” They were back at throwing distance. “Head, throat and gut this time?” he asked. Ferdia raised his chin in agreement. “Your turn to go first,” Darag said.

  Ferdia stuck two spears in the ground, held the third straight and turned his back on the target. Then he turned and threw, without aiming, hitting it too low for head, somewhere between neck and chest. It would have been enough to kill if it had got through the armor. He took the second spear and tried for a throat shot. It seemed to skim along the same path as before, landing almost beside his first spear. Gritting his teeth he took up the third spear, the one that had made the throat shot last time, and sent it toward the gut of the figure on the target, putting all his force behind it. It ended up a little to the left of where it should have been but within acceptable range.

  “Not bad at all,” Darag said. He stuck his own two spears into the ground then turned his back on the target, the third spear in his hand. Ferdia loved to watch Darag like this, his whole body completely engaged in what he was doing. He looked as if he was born to do what he was doing, every action the only possible movement. He took a breath, spun around and hurled the first spear in one motion. He bent and took up the second, threw that, then a moment later, sent the third thudding home after it. “You’re not looking,” he said, laughing.