“Now what?” Taryn asked, without any particular excitement.
Madoc looked into the distance, as though he was contemplating and discarding various rules. “Now hold it against attack.”
“Wait, what?” Jude asked. “From you?”
“Is this a strategy game or a sparring practice?” Taryn asked, frowning.
Madoc brought one finger under her chin, raising her head until she was looking into his golden cat eyes. “What is sparring but a game of strategy, played at speed?” he told her, with a great seriousness. “Talk with your sister. When the sun reaches the trunk of that tree, I will come for my hill. Knock me down but once and you both win.”
Then he departed for a copse of trees some ways away. Taryn sat down on the grass.
“I don’t want to do this,” she said.
“It’s just a game,” Jude reminded her nervously.
Taryn gave her a long look—the one that they gave each other when one of them was pretending things were normal. “Okay, so what do you think we should do?”
Jude looked up into the branches of the thorn tree. “What if one of us threw rocks while the other did the sparring?”
“Okay,” Taryn said, pushing herself up and beginning to gather stones into the folds of her skirts. “You don’t think he’ll get mad, do you?”
Jude shook her head, but she understood Taryn’s question. What if he killed them by accident?
You’ve got to choose which hill to die on, Mom used to tell Dad. It had been one of those weird sayings adults expected her to understand, even though they made no sense—like, “one in the hand is worth two in the bush” or “every stick has two ends” or the totally mysterious “a cat may look at a king.” Now, standing on an actual hill with a sword in her hand, she understood it a lot better.
“Get into position,” Jude said, and Taryn wasted no time in climbing the thorn tree. Jude checked the sunmark, wondering what sort of tricks Madoc might use. The longer he waited, the darker it would get, and while he could see in the dark, Jude and Taryn could not.
But, in the end, he didn’t use any tricks. He came out of the woods and in their direction, howling as though he were leading an army of a hundred. Jude’s knees went weak with terror.
This is just a game, she reminded herself frantically. The closer he got, though, the less her body believed her. Every animal instinct strained to run.
Their strategy seemed silly now in the face of his hugeness and their smallness, in the face of her fear. She thought of her mother bleeding on the ground, recalled the smell of her insides as they leaked out. The memory felt like thunder in her head. She was going to die.
Run, her whole body urged. RUN!
No, her mother had run. Jude planted her feet.
She made herself move into the first position, even though her legs felt wobbly. He had the advantage, even coming up that hill, because he had momentum on his side. The stones raining down on him from Taryn barely checked his pace.