House Solingen had accused the Ruling Judge of the Seventy, Gideon Adon, of murdering his first wife, a daughter of their own House. The Council ruled the evidence insufficient for trial.
— Council record, entered by the clerk of the Round
The champion for House Solingen appeared, looking down as he stepped up onto the edge of the Stone. Judge Adon, already on his mark, spoke. "I did not think you would come." A low murmur came from the crowd across the Round.
And then the murmur changed its shape, because the Solingen champion raised his head and the Reach saw who he was. Gideon's eldest, his son Daniel, whom everyone thought of as the golden child and his father's eventual successor. His face was calm. The old cut through his eyebrow showed white, and he looked rested, like a man who had slept well the night before.
He wore the color of House Solingen, which was nothing but plain grey. His clothes were of a slick fabric, tight and tactical, with no loops or places to grab, the sleeves short, showing the Adon grain gleaming wet and pebbled on his muscled arms. He had come to fight in his father's own armor.
I am Caleb Adon. My father was Gideon Adon, Ruling Judge of the Seventy.
The Abbot moved with deliberate slowness to the edge of the Stone in his grey ceremonial robes and lifted his hands, one to each of the champions, and named the combatants far louder than the Stone needed, the way he said everything. "Gideon Adonijah, Grand Duke of House Adonijah, Ruling Judge of the Seventy," he said, "you face Daniel Gideon Adonijah, champion for House Solingen, in this matter of honor and justice. Both parties have agreed and acknowledge now that this duel is to the death."
My father did not answer. My brother did. "To the death," he said.
I felt my mother move to the edge of her seat, shouting, "No, Daniel — Gideon put a stop to this!" Then the Abbot said the words of blessing that set these duels in motion. "Let God judge between you. You may begin."
My father held out his left hand without turning his head, telling my mother to sit back, then returned it to his sword. He stood proud in his full battle weave, the deep Adon grain shimmering over him like heat off a sun-baked road, his sword drawn, its dolach edge gleaming, both hands folded on the hilt and the tip set to the floor of the Stone. And yet he held it as though it were not needed, as though the boy was not worth the effort of lifting it.
Danny walked the outer rim of the Stone, slow and easy, his hands empty and loose at his sides, circling our motionless father. "You lean on that sword like it is holding you up," he said. "Feeling your age?" His own sword stayed in its sheath.
"So, Father, do you defend your actions?" my brother said. "Does the great Gideon defend himself, or is your contempt for me so great that you will deny me even this? It is all right, Father. I know what you are. Before the morning is out, so will everyone in this room. There is nowhere left to hide, not even behind that weave."
Six hundred people took the same breath at the same time.
My father turned his head to follow him, unhurried. "Watch your tone, boy. You are well out of your depth. Come forward and kneel while I can still show you mercy." He said it as a father corrects a child at a table. "Could House Solingen not afford a true warrior to fight for their claim?"
"I think House Solingen has made the intelligent choice." Danny did not raise his voice. The Stone carried it to every ear anyway. "Do I detect a shadow of fear from Gideon Adon? Be reasonable, Father. Send for Gault, let him rescue you from your arrogant decision. He has always been yours. I have known that since I was twelve."
What I did in that moment was nothing. Danny drifted silently toward our father's back, and the surprise made me stand up. I felt the shout climb into my throat and it died there, because I did not see this coming. I sat back down. God help me, I sat back down.
Danny's right arm came over my father's right shoulder, pulling him back hard and close. I heard my father's grunt. Danny said something to him then. It was quick, and it was quiet, and the Stone that carries every word did not carry that one, because he meant it only for the man he was about to kill.
There was a black dagger in his hand. I never saw him draw it. What I saw, as I watched in that falling light, was a single quick glimmer — the shine of a razor's edge, there and gone. My brother's hand went to my father's back hard and then jerked upwards. It came away empty, and by the time Danny had stepped away toward the rim of the Stone, I could see the dagger, buried to the hilt just below my father's left shoulder blade.
My father went to his knees on the Stone, his sword clattering where it fell. His back arched, his mouth open wide, and then his head fell forward and his hands came down to catch his weight. He stayed there, on his hands and knees, his son's dagger in his back, his blood marking his weave as it ran to the Stone.
And my brother drew his sword. He did it slowly. He did it so that our father, on his hands and knees with the dagger in his back, his long white hair damp against his neck, would have the time to understand what was still to come. And he began, again, to circle.
I looked at his hands. There was no blood on them.
Danny stepped over to where our father knelt, and he reached down toward him. I thought he had changed his mind. I thought he was going to help him up. He laid his hand flat on the back of our father's neck, and the grain came away under it, because a weave does what it is told by the people it was taught to recognize. He folded it once and let it fall on the Stone.
My mother stood up. She could not help herself. She had watched men fight on that floor since before I was born, she knew the rules that governed them as well as any man in the chamber, and what she was about to do broke every one of them. She did it anyway. She put out her hands — open, empty, how you would show a frightened animal you are holding nothing — and she waited until my brother's eyes came up and found hers.
"Please."
In all her life my mother had not asked my brother for anything. The tears were already on her face. He held her eyes a moment longer. Then he shook his head. He looked past her, to Tamar.
"For Rebecca."
My brother struck once. The edge of that sword was grown at the molecular level, not forged, and it did not need a second stroke. The sound of it went up into that beautiful room and broke against the windows and came back down on us.
When it was done he took our father's head up by the hair and held it out at the length of his arm and turned with it, slowly, so that every House of the Reach could see, and the screaming spread like fire.
A boy was already walking out onto the Stone to meet him. A novice, in the pale robes of the Order of Emet, one I had passed a hundred times in our own house without looking at him, with a folded cloth laid across both his arms like an offering — and he was not hurrying, and he was not horrified, because this had been arranged, and he had his part in it, and his part was to be ready.
My brother laid the head into it as gently as a man lays down a sleeping child, and the boy bowed, and turned, and carried it up the low stair to the House Solingen box, and gave it into the hands of the lord who sat there, and that lord took it with a nod.
A nod. As though a debt had been paid.
My mother turned into me all at once, put her face against my chest and wept. Her weight was mine to bear and I took it. I was nineteen years old and I had never held my mother up. My arms wrapped around her and I held her tight. Over the top of her head, across the chaos of that room, I found my brother.
He was staring straight at me.
From The Bramble King, Chapter One