Chapter 35

“ W ell met, Merritt! How goes the day now that the tournament has begun in earnest?”

Fortiss is practically bursting with good cheer, but all I want to do is get away from him. How can he not know…how can he not recognize me? We were wrapped in each other’s arms less than a full day ago!

The band, I remind myself, straightening with spine-cracking severity as I smile grimly at Fortiss. The band protects me. Now I just need to protect myself. “Well enough,” I grunt, trying to damp down his exuberance. “I’ve never seen battles such as these.”

Fortiss doesn’t seem to notice my sour tone. “Of course you haven’t. Rihad is constantly seeking to improve the Tournament of Gold, Merritt. He seeks to make us stronger, to challenge our abilities.”

“He’s allowing warriors to die here . How is that making any of us strong?”

Fortiss’s expression flickers, but he sets his mouth in a hard line. “The Tournament of Gold is a sacred charge, but not all houses answer its call. As tragic as these deaths are, they do show that not all the legacy lines have maintained their dedication to their calling. Divhs are awarded each to the strength of their warrior. You see your own Divh—its size, its strength. All the men here are those that should be here.”

Anger stirs anew, but I snap my mouth shut. I can’t convince Fortiss of my position—I shouldn’t try. Because, despite his words of Protectorate glory, that’s not why I’m here. I’m here to protect my house…and my people.

“Perhaps you’re right,” I say at length. “It’s hard to accept, especially when you also consider the death of the warriors from the Ninth and Eleventh Houses. They were young and untested, with families and houses to protect.”

“I know.” Fortiss lifts a hand to my arm. “But Rihad won’t leave the houses unprotected. He has structured the Tournament of Gold this year to install warriors where they would not have been accepted otherwise, whether for pride or honor or vanity. Think of the Twelfth House, where a lord has not allowed his son to take his place. I cannot think Lord Orlof is battle-ready any longer, yet his pride holds his son from his position.”

I grunt. The Twelfth House’s son is fourteen years old, and Fortiss has already told me his father is a brute. The boy can wait a few years more. Still, I cannot gainsay Fortiss’s words. I don’t know much about Lord Orlof other than what my mother instructed me years ago in how I should act as the wife of his son. And that, of course, doesn’t recommend the old man. He seems to be cut from the same bolt of cloth as my own father, which would make him everything that Fortiss has said: prideful, vain, and stuck in moldering tradition.

But I’m grateful for that, anyway. Orlof’s vanity has kept his son safe from Rihad’s arrows. Not even the Lord Protector will attack a sitting lord in his own house, it seems. So Rihad still has some restraint.

For how long, though?

“Merritt?” Fortiss is frowning at me again, and I shake my head.

“Sorry. A lot to take in.”

“I understand.” He manages a crooked smile, and I wonder if he’s thinking of me—of Talia—of our night together. You’d never know it from his manner. “You should look sharp, though. Your first real battle tomorrow is against Hantor of the Second House. To hear him talk, his Divh will crush yours before yours draws its first breath on the tournament field.”

“Hantor?” I squint at the sky. “That’s not right. I was against?—”

“There’s been a change. That’s why I was coming to find you, actually. I saw you that first day, when you mounted the platform. It seemed you and the Second House already had bad blood between you. I wanted you to know.”

“But why the change?”

“Councilor Miriam meddling again.” Fortiss says the words so off-handedly, I think I misunderstand.

“Miriam?” My heart skips a beat. “But how?—”

“She’s a sensitive. Can pick up moods and attitudes in a blink.”

I nod. So it’s no secret. “I thought as much. But how can that matter in the tournament?”

Fortiss grimaces. “Rihad has been running the Tournament of Gold since before I was born. No matter what he says, his primary goal above all things is to entertain. The greater the challenge between warriors, the better the entertainment. As you no doubt saw today.”

“You managed Rihad’s Divh well.” I don’t mention the Fifth House’s warrior knight again. Or that he’s likely dead.

Fortiss shakes his head. “I—” He catches himself, then begins again. “Thank you. But Rihad had instructed me before the battle on how the old man I fought had disdained his choice to allow me to fight in his stead. He believed it was against the old ways. Rihad wanted a lesson to be made of him.”

I think about the empty tent of the Fifth House, and now I do push the point. “Did he die?”

Fortiss hesitates. “Not yet. But it’s expected sometime later this night. And even if he hasn’t…”

I nod. “The message has been delivered.”

“Yes. It was Miriam who provided the information to Rihad that changed his mind about the tenor of the battle. She also moved through the lot of us today, talking randomly. But she listened and absorbed more than she talked.”

I think of Miriam and struggle to remember what she’d said to me as we’d stood on the platform, protected, I’d thought, from the thundering roar around us. I hadn’t suspected that I’d need to protect myself from her, even as she’d spoken her twisting words about Fortiss.

Fortiss and I turn and move back toward the camps. I don’t miss the deferential glances sent his way. These men saw him command a Divh that was not his own, and they have to suspect that the Fifth House warrior knight is dead. Now here Fortiss is, walking with me through the camp on the eve of my next battle.

I eye him. “What are you doing, talking to me? You didn’t have to warn me.”

He stops, and the glance he sends me is hurried and even a little embarrassed. “I didn’t. I probably shouldn’t have. The announcement will be made tomorrow at the tournament platform. Have the grace to look surprised.”

I nod but am even more confused. “I have no standing in this tournament. In this place. You’ll be noticed, talking to me. As you are noticed talking to anyone.”

“True.” He offers me a small smile, and the moment feels even more awkward. “Maybe I don’t care.”

“Fair enough.” I don’t push the point, but I haven’t seen him speaking with the men from the southern houses, or even with those from the west. I feel a strange emotion prick the nerves in my neck. “And I appreciate the warning. I can prepare for what I know, not for what I don’t.”

“Good.” He smiles again, and I feel it anew, the tiny shiver of awareness that could be friendship among men, comradeship…but given what happened between us last night, it’s something different, something dangerous, despite the protection of my band. Fortiss is a leader under a man who’s murdered for the greater glory of his house. Fortiss hasn’t killed for Rihad—but he would. I must remember that.

Instead, I force myself not to startle as he claps me on the shoulder. “Tomorrow, we shall fight, warrior.” He grins. “And glory will be ours.”

By the time I return to the Tenth House encampment, both Caleb and Nazar are there. Caleb’s curled in slumber, his hand clasped around Nazar’s seeing glass, which now hangs from a long chain around his neck. I eye the priest with surprise, and he shrugs, his lined face at peace in the trailing wisps of his pipe smoke.

“He has a need to see far, and I would help him do so,” Nazar says, as if that’s reason enough to give up the delicate instrument.

I find myself smiling, looking down at Caleb, but when I glance again to Nazar, the priest’s face seems unusually set. Drawn, almost. He gestures me closer, and I step near, into the protecting cover of the thick canvas walls of our tent.

“What is it?” I ask when I’m close enough that none might overhear our words. “What have you learned?”

“It’s not what I’ve learned, but what you have,” Nazar says. He takes another pull on his pipe. “You’ve endured much in this tournament already, and a warrior deserves to know the truth of those with whom he fights.”

I frown at him. The priest seems older than he should, suddenly, his face lined with new sorrows. “I don’t understand.”

He offers me the pipe, and my brows shoot up. I get the sense this isn’t an idle offering, but I’ve never drawn pipe smoke and suspect I’ll choke to death if I try.

Still, he doesn’t speak, merely lifts the pipe higher. I take it, and as Nazar’s eyes crinkle with the faintest amusement, I fit the mouthpiece to my lips.

“Draw soft and don’t swallow, bringing the smoke to the mind but not the heart.”

I don’t know if Nazar is speaking those words aloud or not, but I take a shallow, cautious breath, not trusting myself to do more. The taste of the smoke is curiously sweet, heady, and I blow it as quickly, waiting as long as I dare to take another shallow breath of fresh air. My eyes water, but I manage only the slightest cough.

Nazar nods as I blink away the moisture, but he doesn’t take the pipe back at first.

Instead, he unshoulders part of his cloak, leaving his left arm bare.

“Know the truth, Warrior Talia,” he says.

I blink again hard, then a second time, but the horror of what’s in front of me doesn’t flow away like smoke and tears.

“ Nazar ,” I gasp.

The priest who stands before me has been horribly, grievously wounded. Scars rip and rend their way in a ragged scream down his left arm, making the once-muscular length of it a shredded waste, deformed and twisted. The bones appear to have been broken and poorly reset, and the devastation continues all the way to the base of the priest’s hand—where, unmistakably, a thick scrap of leather is still buried in his wrist, like some forsaken relic. The skin around that knot is white with scars, clear proof of the attempt to fully remove it…an attempt that apparently had been stopped before Nazar lost his hand entirely.

“What…” I begin to ask the question, then realize I don’t need to. The answer has been waiting for me to see it from the very first day. “ You were that banded soldier you told me about, from all those years ago.” All Nazar’s training, his guidance, and his knowledge make sudden, irrefutable sense. “You have a Divh. ”

Nazar’s mouth creases into a tired smile, his eyes suddenly as old as the Sounding Sea. “Had,” he says, his voice sounding very far away. “Wrath. He was the mightiest creature in the capital—in all of the Imperium, perhaps. Noble, strong, and true.”

“But what…”

My words seem to bring Nazar back to the moment. “The Imperium, in its weakness, forbade the connection of warrior and Divh outside the Protectorate many, many years ago. But that’s not the truth you must know now, merely the test of that truth. In my privation, I sought the Light, and I learned that such weakness as I encountered in the Imperium takes many forms. Each equally damning.”

Whether it’s the heaviness of the smoke still in the air or the lulling cadence of Nazar’s voice, I find myself riveted to attention as he continues.

“In the waning days of the Imperial Wars, entire households had been established in the western frontier. Once those warriors understood what lay outside our borders in the Western Realms, both men and women fought to turn back the threat. In that time of dire need, the emperor discovered the unlikely ally of the Divh, and a contract of protection between our races was struck. The Imperium to lead, the Divh to follow, and the Protectorate was formed.”

I nod, my gaze still fixed on Nazar’s shattered arm. How had he… why had he been unbanded so gruesomely? What did he mean by the Imperium’s weakness?

Then his next words command my undivided focus.

“But that contract was not—could not—have been made by men,” the priest says quietly. “Instead, it was proven that the firstborn daughters of the imperial warlords fought with the fiercest strength and greatest connection to the Divhs, and that only they could broker this agreement with the mighty foreign race. Accordingly, they were granted the mightiest of the beasts. Those women became the true first line of warriors.”

I gape at him. “The…daughters?” Unbidden, the image of the Savasci springs to my mind. It’s not so difficult to imagine those women as warriors, having seen their faces, their eyes.

“This is why the law is so harsh in the Protectorate, Talia. Because once upon a time, women were the mightiest warriors in the land. Eventually, men could no longer stomach that truth. But the truth, it still remains.” He fixes me with a hard gaze. “It’s why Gent evolved to match the strength he saw in you, Talia— not because you were weak, but because you were stronger than any son of the Tenth House had been for generations. It’s also why you have taken both to the band and to the way of the warrior with instinctive truth. And why you can succeed now.”

I flinch back, immediately rejecting his words out of habit and yet…and yet…I want to believe him. I want to think that maybe one day I’ll be worthy of the enormous, beautiful Divh who has pledged his bond to me. I want to be the warrior knight both Gent and Nazar believe me to be—someday.

I’m definitely not there yet.

“But it’s not enough. I’m not enough. I’m not trained,” I protest, still staring as the priest slowly reshoulders his cloak, hiding his ruined arm from view. “There’s still so much I don’t know.”

“That’s true,” Nazar says gravely, reclaiming his pipe from my frozen fingers. “But what is also true is that you are Talia of the Tenth House, first-blooded and firstborn. As such, you will fight with power and with honor, and with the strength your blood has given you. And you will always be enough.”