Twelve duels. Twelve draws. Neither of them is trying anymore. #tldr2026
They had drawn twelve times, and the realm had a hundred theories, and not one of them was correct. The truth was simpler, and neither of them would say it: that in the eleventh Rowan had had her -- the opening, clean, a half-second of unguarded throat -- and had let it close. That she had seen him do it. And that she had never once, in the year since, mentioned it, which was the loudest thing Ilsa Rendt had ever not said.
He brought her the good whetstone from Vance's shop, the one she had complained of wanting for a month, and set it on the sill without a word, and did not look at her while he did it. Ilsa considered it for a long moment. “This is a bribe.” “It's a whetstone.” “It is a bribe, it is insulting, and it is the wrong grit.” She picked it up. She did not put it down again. “Thank you being the customary response, I shall say instead that your footwork on Tuesday was appalling and I intend to open on it at midsummer.” A pause. “...It's the right grit.”
“You're favouring the left,” Rowan said. “I'm not.” “You are. Since the ninth.” Ilsa lowered the blade an inch and looked at him with an expression that could have stripped paint. “I am favouring nothing. I let you believe I favour the left because you are the kind of man who commits to a theory.” She turned back to the window. “It is my favourite thing about you. Do stop improving.”
She had not come to supper, which meant nothing, and she had not come to the yard at dawn, which meant a great deal.
Rowan found her in the stable office with her shirt off her right shoulder and a needle in her teeth, working by one lamp, doing a bad job of something that needed two hands and better light. There was a great deal of blood, most of it dry. Border business, then. The kind she was not supposed to have gone on alone.
She saw him in the doorway and did not stop sewing.
“If you say one word,” said Ilsa Rendt, around the needle, “I will finish this and then kill you, and the realm will have to settle its bets in a rather disappointing fashion.”
He shut the door. He crossed the room. He took the needle out of her hand.
She let him.
That was the part that frightened him -- not the wound, which was survivable, and not the blood, which was old. She let him, and she didn't say anything at all, and Ilsa always said something.
It was the eleventh, and Rowan had her.
He would think about it for a year afterward and never manage to make it take longer than it did. Her guard had gone wide on the parry -- a hand's width, no more, the sort of gap that closes itself before most men see it exists -- and behind it was her throat, unguarded, for perhaps half a second.
He saw it. His arm knew what to do. Four years of wanting to win, and there it was, offered, and all he had to do was not stop.
He stopped.
He turned the blade, and let the moment go, and took her riposte on the shoulder hard enough to put him a step back, and the crowd made a noise like a wave because they thought they had seen something clever.
Ilsa did not think she had seen something clever.
She was looking at him the way you look at a word you don't know, and she did not move for a full second, in the middle of a duel, which Ser Ilsa Rendt had never done in her life.
Then she came at him again, twice as hard, and they drew for the eleventh time, and she did not speak to him for nine days.
The thirteenth was set for midsummer, and the whole court had an opinion about it.
Rowan heard them in the long gallery: odds, theories, a squire insisting that Rendt had favoured her left since the ninth. Nonsense -- and he knew it was nonsense because he had watched her left side for four years the way other men watch the weather.
She was at the far window, alone, running a whetstone down a blade that did not need it.
She did not turn. “You walk like a man who's already lost.”
The stone went down the steel. Once. Again.
“Midsummer, then.” Now she looked up, and the grey light found the scar he had given her at the seventh -- the only one either of them had ever landed. “Twelve draws. People are starting to talk. They say we're being polite.” Her mouth did something that was not quite a smile. “They say neither of us has the stomach to finish it.”
She held his gaze a beat longer than the joke needed.
“Prove them right again?”