Game
It started off as a game, an innocent twirling of wands to while away the lazy ivory hours. It was an indulgence she was humored in as she tripped after her brothers on her fat little legs. The edges of her white pinafores would just trail the muddy green fields; her pigtails would fly heedless of pins as she screamed her delight through the plains.
Now she is grown tall and lithe, with limbs of white marble and hair as dark as her heart. Now she is without title or kin, though the memory of both remains a bitter taste on her tongue that turns the game into far more.
It began as a game, it became an escape, and it grew into her life.
The rules of dueling remain unchanged. They are perhaps the only things in the last twenty years that have stayed still.
The first cardinal rule of dueling is: Wands at the ready at twenty paces.
It has been twenty years now since her father died and each measured step she takes is an ironic salute to the man who taught her to duel. It has taken twenty years of training, of bruises and brilliance to reach this point: this climax of lighting reflexes and unparalleled skill. Each step is another year of throwing herself at every obstacle, another year of pushing herself past human limits. In reality the walk takes no more than half a minute, but it feels as if it has lasted eternities.
The second cardinal rule is to acknowledge your opponent: bow with the respect he deserves as a fellow gentleman.
It must be a bow of course. It is unthinkable, unnatural even for a woman to want to duel. Men are more powerful, more formidable skilled, know better, and for this reason, he will win. He always does, has left a trail of broken champions in his wake as he shot to the top.
She grips her wand and she is holding on to an anchor of serenity, a reservoir of power that thrums through her fingertips. Why would she need anything – anybody – when she has this? She whips her wand through the air in the traditional salute and she is not honoring him, she is not cutting through the aether cradling the earth, she is slicing through every person who told her she could not do this. She declines her head fractionally in a graceful mockery of a bow that is a payment of tribute to all that has passed to get her to this point.
The third and final cardinal rule of dueling is the simplest. Never surrender, but fight to your dying breath.This is the rule she has always had the least trouble with.
Set.
It is him standing across the arena. Of course, in this one moment her entire existence has been stretching out towards to seize hungrily, the lone obstacle sitting solidly in her path would be, has always been, him.
Samuel.
"Ally-cat," he says softly, and she is instantly transported to a simpler time, to days of racing his father's horses around her father's property, of climbing out of windows to escape embroidery lessons and sneaking into street fairs to learn new spells. Days when her greatest worry was her mother discovering how often she dismissed her maid and ran around without a chaperone. Days before the plague took her parents, and the Crusades took her brothers, and much more.
She lifts her chin, looks him squarely in the eye and irons the quiver from her voice.
"It's Miss Toothill," she corrects him with a primness that would have pleased as well as shocked her mother. It widens his eyes and for the first time he looks at her and truly realizes what his actions have wreaked, what a fool he has been.
She has not seen him for years now, is a stranger to the premature streaks of grey in his dark hair, if not every contour of his still youthful face. The air between them seems to shimmer slightly. The logical answer is that it is residue from the last duel but she knows better. Each vanishing glimmer if light is a memory, a homage to their shared past.
After all, they are quite a pair, almost a matching set.
Match
Everything has come down to this one moment. The spectators watching with bated breath or cheering raucously have faded into nothing. There are only two people in the world: herself and him, and if she closes her eyes, her heart and her mind he is just another faceless opponent.
'En Guarde' floats through the air from some distant world, and she finds herself moving fluidly, her body moving instinctively through the air, her wand slashing and swishing. She dodges his jelly legs jinx with ease, her lips curling at his pitiful attempt. He of all people should not underestimate her.
She sends a stunning spell hurtling his way, but his shield charm forms a split second before it reaches him, and is strong enough to deflect it towards her. It misses and she cannot help but laugh, an exultant, involuntary sound. He grins back at her and for a moment they are not in a domed arena surrounded by pillars and judges, but are two grubby children laughing at each other in a muddy green field. And then she sends a trip jinx spinning his way and his smile is replaced by a frown, and she has less than an instant to drop to the ground as tongue tying curse hums through the air towards her.
It is exactly the flashy, attention grabbing trick he has always been fond of and that audiences adore. It is the reason he has a fan guild, and has been knighted, and is the toast of every soiree and ball he wastes valuable time at. Well, if they want a show, she can provide one as well.
"Deprimo," she mutters and a wind swirls into being around him, gentle at first and then increasing in intensity until he is an indistinguishable blur, as if seen through water or from very far away. She takes a gulp full of clean air and tries to ignore the burning in her side.
No spell should be able to make it past the vortex encasing him, yet she finds the ground sinking beneath her, the very stage collapsing, and she knows the words 'Descendo' have fallen from his chapped lips. Cursing the fact that no witch or wizard could levitate themselves, she scrambles to reverse the charm. By the time she can spare a glance up, her wind is gone with his curt 'Meteolojinx Recanto' and there is a ferocious glint in his eye that bodes ill.
"Incarcerous," he barks, and she finds herself trapped by raw emotion in his slate grey eyes and by strong white cords which snake around her wrists and ankles.
"Diffindo," she manages as she topples towards the floor. The cords fall to pieces on the floor, but he has already launched another attack. Her shield charm is sloppy, but just strong enough to dissolve his disarming charm.
She glares at him, at the mess of perfection that is his boring brown hair, at his flushed cheeks that are still as round as those of the youth that lived across the fief and rode two miles everyday to practice with a black haired snip of a girl. She wastes a second in wondering if he can see that girl in her face, if the pale eyes huge in her white face have haunted him all the years he has been gone. His answering quirk of lips infuriates her; the words 'Petrificus Totalus' are on her own lips when the lights go out and the world stops.
She silently swears to intricately disembowel whoever taught him such a handy obscuring charm but does not claw at her blindfold as she wants to, as he expects her to. She has always known when he was near, could always feel his presence radiating through a room with the heat of a thousand suns. Without pausing to catch her breath, she aims her patented jelly fingers curse at him, and only then rips off her blindfold to watch her aim prove true.
His wand drops to the ground for a full twenty seconds, another ten and he would have lost the duel, but he fumbles for the counter curse and snatches it off the ground with reformed fingers. His breath is ragged, her hair clings to back of her damp neck and both their robes are dark with sweat.
His fingers twitch and suddenly she is doubled on the floor, blaspheming between giggles as his Rictumsempra hits her in all her most sensitive areas. Her first coherent thought was a savage desire to rip the bastard apart for capitalizing on their childhood, on days spent lying in the hayfields side by side, on the stolen kisses in shadowy corners that impressed every inch of his deceptively wiry frame onto her memory; knowledge apparently reciprocated and stored in turn.
Her second thought was a desperate hope the judges heard his spell and her resulting impersonation of a mad woman did not confirm every prejudice the audience held on women duelers. Paracelsus had just published a truly lovely piece on the topic explaining that hysteria was caused by the movement of the womb around a woman's body.
She shakes her head violently. Has he hit her with a confounding spell as well? It was a double pronged attack quite typical of him, and the only explanation for her rambling. Exhaustion breaks over her in waves; her legs threaten to give way before her but she cannot give in, least of all to him.
She blinks and suddenly he is far too close. They have maintained a healthy distance so far but she does not trust even herself, or any woman worth her salt so close to him. She can see the light scarring left on his cheek from his campaigns; can count the eyelashes framing the colourless gaze that mirrors her own weariness. And when he leans forward she can feel his breath on her hair as he whispers into her ear.
"I know your every move."
Perhaps he knows, by the virtue of long association, her style, knows how her mind darts about in labyrinth like pathways. He knows faint flush of her fair skin, the hollow in her ivory neck, the twitch of her heavy lids in irritation. He knows the way her stormy eyes open in anger.
But he does not know what she is going to do now. He has known the girl. The woman is another mystery.
"Confringo" she sighs and staggers back as the impact of her blasting curse tears apart the room. The ceiling is falling in jagged pieces around the smoking ruin of the arena, and if she had eyes for them, she would have seen spectators scrambling for cover, or watching her with wide eyes and slackened jaws.
She only has eyes for one. She has only ever had eyes for one. He has been flung to the other side of the arena and is lying spreadable across the broken pillar. Her stomach tightens and all the air is pulled from her lungs as she glimpses his body. She weaves through rubble towards him, shaking off the little official who tries to get in her way. Another one has the nerve to plant himself in her path, she sends him a single smoldering glance and he steps back hesitantly, giving her all the space she needs to push past him.
Samuel's eyes are closed, and his tanned face is tinged slightly with grey. She has always seen him in motion; running endlessly through meadows, swaying on horseback, dancing effortlessly at balls, and to see him lying still is terribly unnatural. He looks much younger still, as if before lies not Sir Samuel, decorated hero of the Crusades, but Sam, simple second son. Playmate. Friend. Lover.
The years between their last meeting, the bitter words and broken engagement fall away from her as she looks at his motionless form and realizes he is all she has left. At this revelation, her legs, which stood firm after curse, jinx and hex, buckle and she reaches out to lean against the wall and steady herself, her breath coming in short shallow gasps.
At last he stirs; a merest fluttering of eyelids, and her red lips curve. It has been thirty seconds. It has been thirty years in the making. She kneels down next to him and snakes her arms around his neck, propping him up against the pillar. She kisses him lingeringly, an infinitely teasing brush of lips against his forehead, his scarred cheek, his jaw. He leans forward shakily, pulling her closer with one trembling hand, tangling the other in her curtain of hair, which screens them from the world if they had a care for it.
"Game over, Ally-cat," he snarls, kissing her properly.
This time she decides to humor him
If you liked it, I would LOVE a review