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The blade of Sausage’s greataxe sinks heavy into the last opponent’s shoulder, and he breathes a sigh of relief to see the light fade out of one more person’s eyes.
There. Field cleared. He’s done.
It has been a nerve-wracking week, to say the least. The Great Trials are perhaps Helianthia’s most anticipated celebration, something you only get to experience maybe three times in a lifetime if you’re lucky, and for people of more prosperous ages only once. When he was a boy, he’d heard playground stories back in Mythland, about how a worker from the blacksmith’s forge had travelled west to fight for the old King’s hand in marriage, and had been struck down where they stood for failing to pass the tests. There’s strange magic out there, the boys he knew would whisper, hushed and fascinated, they can do terrible things to mortals. Turn you into a frog.
Sausage was never phased by playground stories, though, and he knows much worse things that you can do with magic than turning people into frogs besides.
No, he’d never been turned away from the prospect of the Great Trials as a boy, and he was certainly not turned away when the news came rolling slowly over the hills at the break of spring that Helianthia’s king, too soon, was taken from his throne. Climbed the giant beanstalk, was the euphemistic phrase they used to describe it in Helianthian dialect, not so different from the Mythic tongue, but just enough to notice. Funny - Sausage remembers a story a little like that. Perhaps this is where it comes from.
The Queen, he knew, was beautiful and clever. Not all powerful women are.
He wanted to know more.
So he left his home, in the light of early dawn, and he made the several hours’ trek on foot across the fields and forests that separated Mythland from Helianthia, and when he arrived he gave them all the information that they needed to put him down as a hopeful candidate for the Trials. The qualifying round came four days hence, by which time Sausage had almost run down all his money; that wasn’t much concern, though. Everybody in that room knew that there were only three ways of getting out of there - dead, disgraced, or victorious.
He navigated big, confusing mazes, recognizing the patterns of the supposedly random sunflowers growing in dotted corners as a path he needed to follow. He strategised in games of loaded chance, saying and doing what he could to put the odds in his own favour, to turn his enemies against each other with himself a distant threat in their eyes. He proved himself in tests of speed and strength, and when others couldn’t hack it, he watched them either drop out in self-disgust, or be put to death for failing any task.
Sausage did not fail. Sausage was not killed. And Sausage did not resign.
This brings him to now, at the final test: a no holds barred deathmatch between himself and the last challenger, a woman from Mezalea. The land of the terracotta men, it’s called, because all its inhabitants are said to have that same clay-brown colour skin, like thousands of copies of the same creator. Sausage doubts that everyone can be the same colour out there in the mesa.
This woman is certainly not made of clay, judging by the way her blood spills thick and violent across the sand, black in the pre-dawn light. He dislodges his axe from her body and watches her fall. Breath lands heavy in the back of his throat, over and over and over again, as he stands still for the first time in maybe an hour and a half.
He’s killed plenty of sheep before - such is the duty of an altar boy, in Mythland; it brings the rains and the bountiful harvest. Not the first time his blade has felled another human, either. It’s more exhilarating than he recalls.
Attendants come to take the corpse away, watching closer than the spectators, who still don’t seem to know the fight is done. Helianthia’s greatest and bloodiest tradition has been upheld today.
Sausage is king.
… Okay, Prince-Consort. But close enough!
He finds himself smiling, even as his blade grows sticky with blood that’s already drying in the last of the cool night air. They’ll likely fudge the time scale a little, in the aftermath, make it so it happened later. Crown his glory with the crowning of the horizon by the dawn. He suspects it’s not too common for the fight to carry on for quite so long as it did - the woman was crafty, very good at finding hiding spots in the expansive arena full of obstacles and cover, and Sausage had taken to singing taunts to her while he familiarised himself with the lay of the land. He’s proud of his work now, though. A noble way to die; a worthy reason to kill.
It’s not clear to him what he should be doing now, though. The attendants that brought the body from the spot where she’d collapsed did not seem like they needed to be followed. Perhaps another guard will come and guide him to his coronation.
A guard is not the one that seeks him out.
He hears her before he sees her. He and his Mezalean opponent were on the far side of the arena from the Queen for most of it, because that was where the better cover lay, and both of them were trying to play it smart. Sausage had caught glimpses of a green-gold figure flashing far above him, a woman he’s only seen the features of in portraiture, too distant to make out beyond the grandeur of her spectator’s box.
For a couple of seconds, he writes the noises off as some stray animal, a squirrel or a wild cat that’s found its way onto the field, and then he thinks again. Those noises are too heavy to be coming from something so small. Whatever it is, he needs to keep his axe in hand instead of slinging it over his back again for safety.
“Another challenger?” he calls into the seemingly empty arena. “Right when I thought that it was over?”
Nobody responds, but that doesn’t sway him.
“Come on, we both know hiding isn’t gonna do you any good. You saw what happened to the last person who opposed me.”
Something shuffles behind a cactus. He whips around and double-hands the heft of the axe in front of him, cutting what he quite likes to think is a menacing figure in the moonlight. This must be what that extra time before dawn was for.
“Come and try me, if you think you’re worthy! I am the newly crowned Prince of this empire!”
“Not yet, you aren’t,” an unfamiliar woman’s voice comes from exactly where he’d placed her, and with a flash of shining blades the fight begins anew.
She’s tall, is the first thing he notices, as he’s fending off attacks from twin sickles dual-wielded at full force. Tall and fair, and hiding a lot of raw strength behind some fairly skinny arms. Sausage finds himself pivoting, weaving, twirling his axe to keep her at bay, not even to gain the upper hand. Where the woman from Mezalea was all dips, ducks and dives, this opponent is full-on, face to face, not afraid of or intimidated by his prowess. She’s blunting the axe that he took so much care to sharpen last night.
(After which he’d knelt at the foot of his cot, in the temporary lodgings, and prayed. No sheep to spill the blood of, not so far from home, so he sought attention from the gentler, weaker saints. That he might walk out of the final trial with his hands dirty, and then wash them of his holy work come day.)
She drives him back across the playing field. Through the centre of the arena, past the mural of the sunflower that splays across the middle of it, mosaic brick among sandstone among sand. It’s difficult to tell who she is or what she’s doing here, but what he can tell is that she’s certainly not dressed for the battlefield. Where Sausage brought sturdy boots, breeches, and a shoulder cape to keep him warm in the early morning chill, her dress is clinging to her legs and her hair is whipping in her face. Impressive, then, that even with those setbacks, she’s still setting the standard for where their feet fall on the field.
Sausage doesn’t bend, though. To run or turn his back would be to die, and Sausage has come too far now to die at the final hurdle. So he lets her blunt his axe with sickle swings, lets her guide the pace and the paces of their dance, and lets her think he’s met his match against her.
The trouble is, for all she’s guiding him back towards the Queen’s side, she isn’t paying too much attention to the exact angle of it - and Sausage has more direction than it seems. Curved blades make twists and turns feel easier. Sausage leads her in a merry dance toward one of the big rocks he started out by finding cover under, and when she thinks she’s got him cornered, he takes his only shot to catch her off guard.
Swing, trip, the stranger topples briefly, and before she can right herself, he’s got her arm pinned to the surface of the stone by an elbow, greataxe held against her neck.
He nudges it up just a fraction, pushes her chin to get a better angle. Blue eyes glint in dying moonlight. Straight hair falls in just-so sweaty strings against her brow.
She chuckles, the first laughter Sausage has heard in a good few days, and drops the sickle in the other hand.
Surrender.
(They’re not iron, Sausage notices, looking closer. The sickles. Hard to tell in this light - could be gold or bronze. Either way, certainly not the kind of metal that usually goes to battle. They look ceremonial.)
“Who are you?” he asks her.
“Oh, so now you’re curious!” she grins.
“And what do you want? Have I not earned my glory?”
“Ahh,” she whips up to grab the axe haft and pull it away from her throat, wrenching him aside with strength unassuming of her frame, “just wanted to see it for myself.”
“HALT,” cries a guard, running up with face red and chest heaving, as Sausage lifts his head to look.
“We’re halted,” the lady calls, audibly cheeky.
“What is the meaning of this?”
Sausage just stares at him. Is this really not part of the fight? Not just some secret more-final-than-final challenge which he didn’t know about, but for real unplanned for?
The lady clears her throat. “Put yer axe down,” she hisses.
He does.
“The fight is over,” the guard says, as if they both don’t well know that, “you were supposed to stay and wait to meet the Queen.”
“But the Queen is…?”
The guard visibly startles. “Candlesticks,” he swears.
The lady seems so smug about this reaction that Sausage becomes immediately certain that she just murdered the Queen while everyone was distracted, and has come for the newly crowned Prince next. He snatches the sickle blade from the hand that he’s been pinning and holds it up to her throat again.
“No -” the guard drags him back a few steps “- she - what in the holy mother’s name are you doing down here?”
Still smirking and now unrestrained, the lady picks up the second blade that had dropped to the floor and spins it idly. “It’s like I just told him a minute ago. I wanted to see his fighting skills for myself.”
“You could have been killed, Your Majesty,” says the guard, and several pieces begin to find their place for Sausage, “both of these challengers possess commensurate skill, as befitting your… majesty.”
“Dios mio,” he mutters, still held tight by the forearm, his blunted weapon bloody on the sand.
“I wouldn’t have, though,” La Reina Perla de Helianthia declares, “unlike some people, I know my level of skill.”
He is brought, unresisting, to the heart of the arena, and sure enough the dawn comes up to crown him.
The Queen of this land, the woman who just gave him a hell of a run for his money after he’d thought the game was won, watches from a distance. After the stunt she has just pulled, she is surrounded by guards and unarmed this time. She seems pleased enough, though.
She does not interrupt his ceremonial rites, and seems to revel in it when the roar goes up across the crowd of spectators. They cannot have a clue what just transpired, thinks Sausage, or they would have been much louder earlier. Then again, perhaps it is the distance between himself and the onlookers that drowned them out; or perhaps he began to tune out their constant noise. Whatever the truth is, the rapid current of unforeseen events are going to be ripe for confusion until the true story trickles across the country in the week of festival to follow.
Oh, wow. A week of festival. Nothing Mythland hasn’t rivalled, sure, but not the most exhilarating prospect after the week of trials he’s just endured. Maybe he’ll be ready to get into it this afternoon.
Sausage lifts his chin and accepts his crown (the real one, not the sunrise) like he’s been owed it all his life. The rest will be history.
They do take him to a quiet room when he requests it. It’s the room where all the challengers used to bunk, in the week that has just passed. Everyone else’s belongings have been removed.
Eleven empty beds, and everything that Sausage thought to bring.
He changes clothes first, wary of the sweat of battle and the blood of his victory. (His real victory, not the second dance against the Queen.) Then he thumbs through the hymn book, idly looking for any lines that might bring him guidance here. Mythland has a lot of forces in its mythology, with a lot of power tugged between their teeth. Sausage knows that it is blood that has brought him the power he sought, too.
In lieu of any mumbled platitudes to nameless maws, he finds his pocket knife, tucked safe in the folds of the bedding he was given. He licks blood from a beading wound some seconds later, and feels comfort for it. This is better worship.
Beyond that, all that he brought was extra rations, extra coin, his water skin and his honour. These are all he has really needed.
His bride the Queen must be reveling by now, spreading the first tendrils of their meeting story out across the nobility as she does. It will be one to tell the kids, if nothing else.
… Sausage wonders if they’re going to fall in love.
It would be a pretty thing, sure. The Sunflower Queen and her bloodstained groom, matrimony formed in a fight that was evenly matched, and then they fell in love.
That is a question for a far future time, though. He has no plans to fall in love with anyone before the week is up at the very least, even his betrothed. If she likes him, she will have to wait.
She certainly seemed to like him, out there. Seemed to match his spirit, meet his steps. Smiled at him.
He has been wanting to know more about the Queen of Helianthia for a long time now. It seems he finally will.
She cheers, alone, when he arrives on the royal balcony. Around her, maybe seven women in various states of dress and drunkenness all turn to stare.
“Is that him?” says one of the redheads.
“Yeah, that’s my husband! Hi!”
“Good morning,” Sausage says.
“Well-trained,” the other redhead, slighter and clothed head to toe in coral pink, opines. “You can’t go wrong with that. Manners are hard to come by in a husband these days.”
“I’ll say,” giggles the tallest of them. Everybody in fancy clothing laughs, and the servants beside them smile in turn.
Pearl extends a wide and sweeping arm. “Come sit! I wanna get to know you!”
Sausage obliges. “Well, what do you wanna know?”
“I dunno,” says Pearl, “whatever you think’s important.”
“I think…” He considers it. “I think you ought to know that I think you’re pretty stupid for picking that fight.”
She scoffs. “Ah, c’mon, it was fine! You lived!”
“You lived.”
“You’d just been wearing yourself out for ninety minutes. It’d be a wonder if I didn’t.”
“I told you that was a dumb idea,” says the coral one.
“You don’t spar with me,” says Pearl without looking back, “or you’d know I’m good.”
The royal turns away, towards the others of her circle. They all seem to get the hint.
Sausage starts again. “I hail from Mythland,” he tells her. “Your ancestors used to be neighbours of mine.”
“Mythland, yeah,” the Queen nods, contemplating her drink, “you got royal blood, then?”
“Hard to say. We have a long line of kings who got around.”
She snorts - “Yeah, heard that too.”
Sausage finds himself smiling. With innuendo, he’s in his element. “It’s practically tradition, for Mythic people. Living up to our ancestors’ names by getting down and dirty.”
“Oh, saints, you can’t be goin’ on like that,” Pearl says, “the last thing we need is an infidelity rumour before it’s even past noon.”
“Okay, okay!” He raises hands. “I’m very chaste and responsible and I’ve never even looked at another woman. Or man. Or panda. Or anything else.”
“Hang on, panda?!” she giggles.
“War story, war story!”
“What kind of war story had somebody sleeping with a panda?”
“They didn’t sleep with him, I promise! It’s just - he was our General, back in the day. Because the human general honestly did about as much.”
“But nobody…?”
“Nobody boinked a panda, yeah, it just came to me.”
She blinks, like she’s not even going to try and challenge boinked. “Do these sorts of things come to you like that often?”
“Oh, yeah, for sure, all the time. You never know what I’m gonna say. But I’m also very good at not saying all the things I wanna say in polite company.” That’s a lie and Sausage knows it. He just doesn’t wanna drop her in at the deep end too hard, is all.
“I mean, don’t worry too hard. It’s not like you’re in charge of the country now, not unless I die. More top advisor.”
Sausage tilts his head and leans back playfully. “And is it very likely that someone’s gonna come kill you?”
“I hope not,” says Pearl. “That’s another reason why I wanted to fight you right off the bat. Make sure you know I can hold my own. That I’m not just gonna roll over and let you take the throne like that.”
“Has that happened before?”
“Sure! To my great-grandpa. Winner let him live for about a month, just enough time to get her pregnant, and then - whoops! What a surprise, the prize-winning warrior took out the very powerful man who slept in the same bed as her.”
Siring an heir. That’s another question which they’ll have to revisit later. Sure enough, there’s more than one reason to get down and dirty, as he’s just put it.
“But, y’know - now you know I’m not gonna take it. So if anybody does try and kill me, they’re gonna have to get through both of us first.”
“Okay, alright,” he nods. “And that’s if the assassin even makes it past your guard, right?”
“Sure,” says Pearl, in a tone that makes it very clear exactly how highly she thinks of her guard. Fair enough, Sausage decides. She did slip them this morning, didn’t she?
Fascinating. A queen who will not sit around and wait for her staff to take care of her, who takes decisions into her own hands, even when they seem like very stupid ones - because, if they are, well, she can very clearly back herself up. Sharp-witted like her ceremonial blades.
Hey, that’s a good point.
“So why were you using those sickles? Don’t you have steel?”
She chuckles. “Oh, I’ve got netherite in the armory -” and isn’t that exciting “- but I wasn’t gonna bring the good stuff up into the box with me, ‘cause then they would’ve suspected something. Those are my grandmother’s. She was the baby in that other story about the surprise murder.”
“Oh!”
“Yeah - told ‘em I was carrying them for good fortune. And I was! I’ve got the good fortune of knowing first-hand how you fight now!”
Really fascinating.
Pearl plucks at golden stitching along her silky green dress. It’s a lovely thing, if entirely unsuited for battle. He’d noticed this before, but he can see it even better now that the morning is in bloom. The fabric looks as though it might tear in a strong breeze, and she has these intricate strappy sandals tied halfway up her shins, marigold-yellowed leather to match the other accents. Sure, Sausage has heard of wearing leather-strap sandals for combat, but he thinks that those would be a good bit more… sturdy.
And her crown of sunflowers, which she was not wearing down in the ring. “Your flowers look so fresh,” he tells her. “Did you just get that made right now?”
“‘Bout an hour ago, yeah,” says Pearl. “They work fast and well, our gardeners. There’s magic in it, too, of course. A story like this might keep them pretty ‘till sundown.”
Helianthia’s magic comes from stories, is what they say. Beanstalks and candlesticks and golden geese, pails of water, plum pies. The land is built on the bodies of giants, if you follow it all. More than once a Helianthian has sent their opponent home with mercy on the condition that they go on to tell the tale.
Sausage does not know how much he believes in the power of a story. Magic comes from blood, from that well of vitality that flows through everyone’s veins, and not everyone can spin a pretty yarn so well as they can bleed.
But, he will concede, teeth and tongues are most at home when one is pressed against the other.
“Pretty sure there’s one loose at the back, if you want one,” says Pearl.
“Thanks.” Sausage’s back straightens again, and he scoots over to check. Sure enough, a single bloom is sitting lonely in her hair, tangled a good distance from the crown about where Pearl’s shoulder blades sit. It must have caught on the draped neckline on the back of the dress, the extra fabric that collects there, shiny.
He takes it and tucks it behind his ear. He is the arm of the Sunflower Empire now, after all. He would do well to look like it.