Love And War by Various Page A

the holes in the king's armour, as though the rubies were melting. “I had forgotten how painful this was.”
    “You could have asked me.” The stag raised its pain- wracked head. Now the split horn
     sagged apart, its cleft gaping, and exposed bone at its root.
    “I could have,” the king agreed. “It seemed rude.” He spoke with difficulty. “It seems I
     have fulfilled a pledge and will die in service.”
    The stag said, “I also.” He added, “Could you help me over to the last standing draconian?
     I would not mind dying with such memorial.”
    The king, gasping, carried the shuddering body of the stag to the foot of the standing
     draconian. “He has - ” He coughed.
    “Can you speak no more clearly than that? I seem not to hear well just now.” The rumble of
     the moving horns covered all sound.
    The king braced himself and said distinctly, “This one has a hoof-print on his chest.
     Yours?”
    “I would nod, but I have a headache.” Blood ran from his split forehead. As though
     watered, the twin horn-shards sprouted buds of antlers.
    “Then he will wear my marks as well.” Holding the stag with one arm, the king removed his
     own crown and placed it on the stone figure before sliding wetly down its side to the
     grass.
    The stag rasped, “Either I am overly sensitive by nature, or this seems harder than
     usual.” Blood was flowing darkly around the dust in his chest wound. “Could you not
     distract me?”
    “I could try.” The king tilted his head back in pain as he inhaled, and sang in a
     quavering voice:
    "FOR EVERY WRAITH WHO BREAKS HIS FAITH MUST WANDER WITHOUT CEASE AND, COLD, PERFORM WHAT HE DID, WARM, AND NEVER REST IN PEACE.
    He coughed, and a hairline of blood ran from the corner of his mouth. The stag, looking up
     through filmy eyes, took up the song for him:
    SO, EVERY NIGHT THE STAG BETRAYS THE LOVE HE COULD NOT KEEP AND KING AND HOST DESERT THEIR
     POST TO HUNT AND NEVER SLEEP.
    They finished, singing together. It took them a long time, since one or the other often
     stopped to gasp for air, and it seemed important to them that they finish as one:
    AND SO THEY SHALL BETRAY AND HUNT, UNTIL THE DAY THEY SHOW THAT THEY SOMEHOW FULFILL THE
     VOW THEY BROKE SO LONG AGO."
    Done, they collapsed against each other. “Not a bad song, really,” the king said. “Needs a
     little tightening here and there, perhaps, fewer cousin-rhymes, but at least it's
     something of us left behind.”
    “True. Many have died with less fame and with worse poetry.” The stag's antlers shuddered
     painfully back into place. The stag, eyes upward, lay his head on the king's lap and
     stared at the draconian. “Who would have thought that I should be hunted by such as this?
     Or that you should hunt them?”
    The king's voice was low and halting. “True. They are vile, and we were proud. But for
     once, we both have died for something besides ourselves. And when you have been dead as
     long as I - ” he wavered, and said in a last breath - “a little variety in one's chosen
     way of dying is not such a bad thing.”
    And as the stag joined the king in final death, he thought sleepily that after a thousand
     years of nightly betrayal, transformation, pursuit by the dead, painful death and more
     painful rebirth, almost any change was pleasant. He cradled his head against King Peris's
     stomach, and the two accepted death as, long ago, it had accepted them.
    No one but Time removed the bodies; eventually they disappeared. The stone draconians became overgrown and powdered under the pressure of
     weather and vines; time's best warriors. Only the one draconian, wearing an ancient crown
     and scarred on its breast with a cloven hoof, remains. For reasons no one living knows, it
     does not crumble. Go to the wood, no longer called Darken, and you may see it yet.
    Once, not long ago, the Forestmaster came into the glade and stood before the single
     draconian. The crown was