Free The True Prince by J.B. Cheaney

dreadfully as the world narrowed: just him, just me, each seeking out the other's weakness in the same way, I suppose, that lovers tease out each other's charms.
    His first hit, a straight punch to the chest, drove the wind out of my lungs and filled my vision with red. Coughing, I dodged right and left until he emerged from the haze, then swung wildly at his stomach and was amazed to see him double up. Only the shock to my wrist convinced me that the blow was mine, but making firm connection at last seemed to add weight to me. I swung again, expecting my knuckles to jar against his ribs—but missed, leaving myself open. Pain slammed into my own ribs instead. I felt the hurt I'd meant for him, which doubled my resolution to give it back. It was not anger that possessed me now, but a kind of hunger, a craving for the crack of bones. My left swung and missed again, but the right—beautifully—caught him on the point of the chin and flipped him back like a leaf. He caught himself in themidst of his fall, bounced upright again, and came directly at me, his pale eyes as sharp as sudden knives. I remember nothing clearly after that.
    They were shouting our names, though at that moment we were not Kit and Richard, but two unleashed winds. We bore into each other until our knuckles were bloody and our eyes glazed. I was down, I was up; we were locked chest to chest, twinned hearts furiously pounding. He was down, he was up; he knocked me out of the ring. The shouting—such a vital animal, it had grown hands and feet—pushed me back in.
    I do not know how long it was until a hard thump on the jaw spun me around. Next I knew, my right shoulder was mashed against the floor. Splinters from the rough boards speared up in my vision. From overhead Kit's voice pressed down on me like an unsteady hand: “Don't. Don't get up.” But all around me the noise contradicted him, chanting: get up, get up, get up. Slowly I rolled onto my chest, put my palms to the boards and pushed, flinging blood and sweat out of my eyes. The shouts rose with me, thick and fierce.
    “That's enough.” One voice stood out distinctly, and no wonder: it was Richard Burbage's, the most celebrated voice in London. “Enough,” he said again. I gained an unsteady foothold on the stage. Someone thrust a cold towel in my hands. I buried my face in it and heard my name again, but this time in one clear tone that gradually emerged as Starling's.

    “Who won?” I asked her as she was patching me up in the Condell kitchen. My voice came out at a rasp, owing to a bruised throat.
    “The orthodox view is that he did, but there's no canon to judge by.” She was wrapping my chest with linen to shore it up against possible cracks. “Master Burbage failed to make it clear how long you were to stay down. You started up again in far less than ten counts, so it should have gone on, but the Company feared for the damage, I think. No one denies you gave a very good account of yourself. He looks no better than you.” She finished the wrapping and pulled the end of the linen so tightly that I gasped. “Does that feel like knives gouging your vitals?”
    “No.” I took a careful breath. “More like … like babies gumming from inside my chest.”
    She knew not what to make of this comparison. “Well … I hope that means nothing is broken.” She gave a final pull and tucked in the strip securely. “You'll live, and feel better for it, in time.”
    Nell the cook had larded my cuts and slapped a piece of raw stew meat on my swollen cheek and boiled up a batch of onions to make a poultice for my throat—with a pot to cook in, I might have made a good dinner. “I felt better when he was pounding me than I do now.”
    “That's because you were pounding him back. You haven't told me yet what it was all about.”
    I had told her almost nothing. The Company released me from rehearsal early so she could see to my injuries (Kit had to stay). The walk home—stopping once for me