[1] WEEPING MONK // you're not what I was looking for

35| A Lover's Duel {Part Two}

[TW// mild violence]

Lancelot distances himself from the queen and Ari takes a drastic step to try and bring them back together.

A tentative silence fell as the Fey queen took up the sword.

Even the leaves of the trees stopped moving with the wind. Lancelot felt the air around him shift, prickling at his skin. He could almost feel the anxiousness radiating from those gathered around them but perhaps only Hector understood that he would not hurt her.

Ari's eyes lifted slowly from examining the sword and landed on him and only him. He had bested his brother. He had bested Arthur. But neither of them had thousands of years of warrior's blood running through their veins. Neither of them had beaten the monk at his own game before like she had done.

"Best of three, Lancelot?" Ari raised an eyebrow at him with her challenge as she rotated the blunted blade over her wrist. She had not been able to get him to speak to her since the kiss which they had shared so willingly, and if this was the only way that he was going to interact with her then so be it. Romance was foreign to him but he understood war completely and she expected that he might indulge her in this one thing.

Lancelot swallowed down cautiously. Her golden gaze was somehow cold, like she had emptied her eyes of everything which he held dear to his heart.

"Four," he corrected her and she narrowed her eyes at him in confusion. Four? He had just fought twice and it took her a moment to understand his meaning. He was speaking of them, in the circle, by the river... oh.

Ari flexed a couple of fingers around the blade's pommel, "You did not have your sword the second time, therefore that one is void."

I still had you pinned to the ground, Lancelot thought but he did not let the solid of his face weaken or his attention break from her.

The others looked between the queen and the traitor with questioning eyes, the second time?

Hector shifted his weight from where he was merging with the group, arms crossed loosely over his chest. "Just how many times have you tried to kill each other?" He asked almost comically whilst his eyes darted between the pair, assuming that that's what they had been intending to do in the first place.

Ari's expression darkened to a smirk and her eyes flicked over to Hector quickly but came back to the other Ash. The two brothers could not be more different. Hector was full of life and an uncommon joy whereas Lancelot was a cloaked figure of war and fire.

"Many times," she said with a smug smile, though it wasn't entirely true.

Lancelot wet his lip, tasting the salt of his sweat on his tongue. He was not tired just yet, so he nodded to her and accepted the challenge. He didn't think that Ari would let him yield before their blades had even met anyway.