Chapter 22

T he crowd’s roar jangles my ears, and I follow the guard’s directions exactly, nearly blown back by the second roar when Kheris takes his position. I hadn’t realized how well I’d be able to see him, but he strides confidently onto the platform, taking the exultation of the crowd as his due. When he turns to honor the Lord Protector, his gaze sears me across the open space between us. I find myself suddenly glad that warriors don’t fight with their fists, as Nazar keeps saying, but with their minds.

The Lord Protector says something, and I rivet my gaze to the top platform, though in truth I can’t focus only on Rihad. Fortiss stands there as well, his face placid as he stares out at the crowd. He doesn’t look down at me, and I suppose that’s a blessing. He probably also expects me to lose.

Irritation sears through my gut, turning that river I’m supposed to be flowing along into fire.

Lord Rihad lifts his left arm high into his air, and mine shoots up as well. I can feel the fiery band clenching tighter around my arm. I curl my right hand into a fist and lay it against my heart. I can suddenly hear the pounding of my blood in my own ears, but unexpectedly, it isn’t rushed. It’s slow, like water falling over rocks.

Gent, I think in my mind, feeling the wind in my hair as we raced through the blue mists of the training field. Gent .

A far distant roar of joy greets my words.

Lord Rihad drops his arm.

The first thing I see is the coliseum, but not with my own eyes. Instead, I am far above it, staring down, the people screaming like so many field mice in their strange?—

I shake my head, hard, and am once more back in my body. I yearn to turn and see Gent in the sunlight, but my feet stay rooted to the platform, my breath hitching in my throat. Focus.

Kheris faces me now, his hands lifted in preparation for a strike. And then I look behind him with my human eyes to see the monster roiling at the far end of the field.

I blink.

Kheris’s serpent is everything Nazar had warned me of and more. Broader than the Tenth House manor, it’s impossible to tell how long it is because it hovers and darts and retracts and hisses all at once. Its hood is flared wide, and I see how it seems to leap up far enough to fly—it has hooded sacs all down its body, like flaring gills meant to catch the wind. It eyes the far end of the field with interest. Behind me, Gent lets out an almighty roar that drives the crowd’s cheers to a fever pitch.

But I know Gent a little already, if not his roars. As I shift back to his view, I feel the confusion in his mind. He’s never faced a monster like this. He surely didn’t expect to be attacking it when he came here today. He merely wants to run.

The serpent shoots forward. It moves with blinding speed, and my thoughts flow into command as clearly as I can make them. Run, Gent, I urge. Run fast!

In my mind’s eye Gent surges forward, but I don’t have to rely on a mental picture of him for long. I feel the shuddering of the earth and hear the pounding of his feet on the tournament field. As he shoots by me, I gasp at the sight of him—so much taller than I’d imagined, his long arms flowing behind him as he bends forward. Not only because he wants to make them into wings, with his silver hair flowing over dark green hide, but because his hands are bristling with long claws that click together heavily, a dead weight. Another claw sprouts from his elbow in a thick gnarl of bone, and his body seems bulkier now as well than when I’d seen him in his own plane.

His keening wail rends open the sky as he surges forward. His head is larger than I remember it too, made imposing by the thick ridge of bone that rises up from his shoulders and flares into horns. Now those horns are targeting the serpent, who, despite its greater speed, is apparently not used to monsters running straight at it. Some of Nazar’s words seep into my mind, a way of strategic timing that counseled to close in fast and hit the enemy quickly and directly, before the enemy has decided to withdraw, break, or hit back.

Even as I think the words, Gent shifts his body and angles more tightly toward the serpent, who hesitates the split second needed for Gent to propel his arms forward and wrap them around the beast, flipping it over onto its back.

The crowd roars but I can’t hear it, can’t hear anything except the crash of Gent’s blood in my ears, the rasp of his throat. Gent grunts as he flings himself away from the creature, and I mimic his actions, shaking my arms slightly as I straighten on the platform.

All at once, I see Kheris across the space between us. The giant warrior holds his body in the forward pose of attack, his face a mask of fury. I pull Gent around with a twitch of my torso and the Divh swings, reluctantly, his arms still spread wide. Everything that isn’t bone stings in a light, zipping fury, and I realize the skin of the serpent must be secreting some sort of poison. Not enough to cause serious harm, I suspect, but enough to make a combatant think twice about grappling with it.

Gent hadn’t known about that. I hadn’t known. And so we’d rushed in and done what apparently no one had done before.

It takes the serpent another long moment to flip around, but its belly has been exposed. A more experienced fighter or one going for the cut that springs to my mind—a cut that follows the body with the long sword or in this case, Gent’s brutal claws—would have attacked that belly, I suddenly know instinctively. Even a poor cut would be better than withdrawing and circling around, as Gent is now doing.

But the moment is lost.

The serpent recoils and follows Gent with his eyes, its hood flaring ominously, its mouth open in a long, protracted hiss. No fire flows from its mouth, and I’m grateful for that. Gent’s arms still sizzle where the poison has hit him. The snake darts out, and Gent twists to the side, but the two hold their détente for nearly a minute, Gent circling and the snake watching.

The crowd rustles with shouts of encouragement, and there’s even some laughter at Gent’s taunting feints, but I hold my Divh close—on his feet, poised—knowing that the danger is only growing. The snake is longer than him by several dozen paces. And if it touches Gent, the memory of its poison is strong. Close combat isn’t the answer with this creature.

I’m in Gent’s eyes again, seeing what he sees. The billowing sacs along the serpent’s body are aspirating like the gills of a fish, their rhythm almost mesmerizing as they gape and withdraw, gape and withdraw. A kernel of an idea forms in my mind as my gaze sweeps the open, dusty field. If I can only?—

I don’t have the chance to finish the thought.

On the other platform, Kheris shouts something in a language I don’t understand, and as I blink my focus back to him, torn between what Gent sees and what I see, he punches his hand into the air several inches.

In the center of the field, the snake shoots upward too, propelled by the intensely tight coils of its tail. For one incredible moment, it soars straight up, and even Gent flings back his head, staggering in wonder to see it move that way. Then the serpent comes down again, all mouth, and plows its full weight into Gent’s left shoulder.

Pain blasts through me as teeth bear down on Gent’s tough hide. The snake wrenches its iron jaws hard to the right, and Gent screams as flesh tears and muscles split. I clench my hand into a tight ball and shift it up, more out of instinct than any true knowledge. At the center of the field, Gent wraps his massive hand into a fist, rendering it a spiky ball of bone, and drives it into the base of the snake’s jaw. But though Kheris staggers back a step on the opposite platform, the searing pain in my shoulder does not give way. The snake holds on, clamping down, as Gent pounds at its head both above and below.

A hot sluice of liquid pours down my chest and I glance toward it, startled to see a small patch of blood blooming on my shoulder. Fury ratchets through me that’s not wholly my own. On the field, Gent screams anew, this sound an awful mix of rage and fear—not for himself, I realize on some level, but for me. With another mighty punch, he manages to loosen the serpent’s jaws, then screams again as the vile creature slides bodily along his arms and legs again as he attempts to fling it from him, the poison of its scales setting fire to every inch of skin.

I stumble to the side as the horns blow above my head, and the roar of the stadium is deafening. The battle is over, but my eyes are still Gent’s, my skin his as well. Everything burns like fire, and he turns, then turns again, finally finding the tiny platform at the center of the coliseum. He takes a step forward, only stopping as I raise a hand.

No, no, I implore, though my mind is his mind, his fury and pain and outrage mine as well. Gent reaches his paw to me, pointing across the giant field, and I lift my hand toward him. The warrior knights who battled on this field before hadn’t done this, but I feel as if I cannot help but reach out to this Divh who is my Divh, even as he reaches out to me who am his bond. We hold that connection for a long, impossible moment, and I see more—so much more, as pain washes through me. The sunlit hillsides of his homeland, strewn with dark blue and white flowers, overlooking a windswept sea. The deep rich purplish green of the far mountains that he calls his home, the?—

With another blast of trumpets, Kheris’s mighty war snake disappears, shaking me back to the tournament grounds. I focus my mind on Gent returning back to that mountain home he imagines, running through those flowering fields.

Go. Heal, I think, and Gent vanishes as well. His presence in my mind lingers, however, as the door to the wooden tower opens beside me—those flowers, that windy vista, the smell of something fresh and clean—the image swamps all my senses and I smile, feeling Gent’s touch of healing all the way down my spine.

Thank you, I think, though Gent is long gone.

Then there’s someone at my shoulder, the guard from the staircase. “Bow at the waist,” he instructs tersely, though his words aren’t harsh, exactly. More scared.

“Oh, right. Sorry.” I curl my fist to my heart and bow across the open space to the triumphant Kheris, then again to the Lord Protector, who stares down at me from his lofty perch. Everyone up there is staring at me, I realize. I straighten as I accept the heavy pad the guard is pressing to my shoulder, and glance his way. “Did I do something wrong? Besides the obvious?”

He snorts. “Not so anyone could see, or nearly anyone. Otherwise Kheris would be over here demanding blood for drawing any attention from his victory. We’ll get the platform cleared quick enough.” He nods to other men as he turns me toward the door, and I frown as they all converge around me.

And then I see it.

Flowers.

Midnight-blue and white petals lie scattered over the platform, stirring in the wind. Across from me, Kheris is being led through his own door, and I duck inside as the men sweep and push the mound of flowers in behind me. “How…”

“Get these bagged and hauled out of here, or it’s our heads,” snaps the guard to the other men. To me, he nods toward the stair. “You can manage?”

My stomach pitches queasily, but I duck my head. “I can manage.”

“Good. I’ll go down ahead. You fall, I’ll catch you.”

We make it around two tight corners before he speaks again, his voice low. “You be careful. The Lord Protector doesn’t like surprises he doesn’t engineer. Those flowers that showed up at your feet qualify as a surprise.”

“But I—” I shake my head. I have no idea how they’d appeared. “That’s not…usual?”

He coughs a short laugh. “No. That’s not usual. And you’ll want a believable excuse if you’re asked. Say they were sewn into your tunic, and the force of the serpent’s attack loosed the seams.”

“Oh!” I turn to him as we make our way down the stairs. “That’s good. Thank you for—for this. For your kindness. I’ll repay you for it, I swear.”

That’s clearly the wrong thing to say, as the guard stares back at me, the color in his face too high. “You must be living under a rock, you and your house. You have nothing to repay. I’ll be asked as well, and the better my story and yours, the more likely we’ll both escape Lord Rihad’s wrath. Right now, he finds you a curiosity, not a threat. Best to keep it that way.”

I grimace as we reach the bottom floor. “I think I’ve amply proved I’m no threat.”

“And I think you’re wrong.” He peers at the door and sighs, listening to the sound of trumpets above. “We wait,” he says simply and then, a minute later, he cocks his head, listening to the ebb and flow of noise outside.

“Kheris is off the platform,” he says, nodding sharply. He raises his voice. “Open the door!”

The door swings away, and I hear the cheer of the crowd, clenching my jaw tight as the guard roughly shoves me out and into the arms of one of his fellows. The two of them push me up on my warhorse so quickly, I wrench my shoulder again, but as my vision swims, I manage to hear the guard’s orders to his mate. “Get ‘im out of here fast. Full gallop, down to a walk after he enters the central passage. Don’t let anyone look too close.”

Panic fills me as I look down at my tunic, my breeches—has my costume failed me? Have I done something wrong? But nothing looks out of place, save for a few stray blossoms on my tunic. I frown but hold on to the pommel of the ornate saddle, grateful for something to focus on as my warhorse surges forward. The animal doesn’t need me to tell him to run fast and hard; it’s how he’s made. Still, as we make our way to the central passage, cut into the middle of the spectator stands, the applause finally breaks through my pain. I lift my head, and a roar of cheers go up in the stands closest to me, none louder than one young boy near the central passage.

“Merritt! Merritt!” he shouts, then he disappears down the corridor, shoving his way through the crowd.

My stomach twists. It’s the boy from the fighting pits, who even now is wearing my tunic, I suspect. I’ve failed him, after all he’s already endured.

Are the other men I purchased watching as well, I wonder? Are they reconsidering their decision to ally with the Tenth?

I grimace as another surge of pain rips through my shoulder, then the warhorse slows to a trot, turning into the cutaway passage through the coliseum walls. We’ll pass beneath the seats and onto the open ground beyond, and then this will be done.

But I am not finished yet. The boy from the fighting pits suddenly appears above me, leaning above the railing. “Merritt!” he shouts again as he drops something over the edge.

Instinctively, I flinch, angling the horse away from the thrown rock or garbage or even my balled-up tunic. But as I blink, my eyes focus on the flashes of midnight blue and white that are falling softly down over my head and shoulders, drifting over my horse’s thick mane.

Flower petals.

The roar of the crowd pounds through my ears as we flee the coliseum.