“He did.” Her shoulders sagged and she reached to take the chits from Diam. “But it wasn’t for sport. He was looking for you.”
Diam jerked his treasure from reach. “I wanna go.” His chin set. His hands gripped the metal bits as if they were a message from his brother. “Korish bought these. He bought them, so we have to go.”
Renee was about to reject him again, but Diam’s desperate eyes halted her. She took a breath. He asked for so little. Yes, the scraps of information a spectator could gather from watching the pointless killing would be meager, but there was little else she could do. And if . . . “Will you promise to stay within sight of Hunter’s Inn and mind the innkeeper’s wife?” she asked, and was rewarded by immediate head bobbing. “Very well.” Renee squatted down to the boy’s level. “But you must keep to your word. Your brother offered his life for yours. Don’t squander his sacrifice.”
Diam’s green eyes widened and he nodded again.
Renee prayed to the gods that was enough.
The Underground took time to find. Hidden in plain sight, its facade blended with the crumbling brick of the rest of the block. Inside, it bustled with youthful energy. Adolescents crowded the mismatched tables, shouting and laughing over one another.
Renee expected to find Alec in a corner and swallowed surprise at seeing him amidst a thick crowd. Several girls around him leaned forward in their seats, their eyes glued on his moving lips. Smiling, Renee wondered whether her friend even noticed the attention. His muscled body, so typical among the fighter cadets, here drew admiring gazes.
When she approached, a boy with skinny shoulders and black curls smiled a greeting. His eyes traced her curves, and he blushed when she raised an eyebrow. Hers was a fighter’s body too. The corners of her mouth twitched.
The boy grinned. “I’m Ivan. What’s your name?”
“Renee,” Alec answered for her. He sounded more startled than pleased. “Good to see you.” He gave her his seat and pulled up another chair for himself. A pause stretched several heartbeats. “Uh, let me introduce you. Renee, uh, meet Ellina, Sheri, Ivan, Jasper, Timon . . . ” He motioned to each companion in turn, continuing around the dozen people at the table.
She forced a smile, infected with her friend’s discomfort. The group smiled back. The boy with black curls held out his hand, a tentacle of blue glow snaking its way to her. She frowned, looking at Alec for clarification.
Her friend blushed, and a light stream of his own swam out, meeting the boy’s. “No, she isn’t, uh—”
The boy’s glow and smile died together. “She’s a blinder?”
Alec’s lack of answer ushered in a heavy silence. Her skin crawled. Blinder. Under their scrutiny, Renee scraped back her chair, collected her dignity, and faced her friend. “I found practice swords and came to see if you wished to spar.”
“Sure,” Alec answered too quickly and bid the table farewell, promising to return.
“Nonsense.” A pretty boy with peach-fuzz cheeks and glasses rose with Alec. “We’ll watch. I love a fight.”
Shushing the warning bells in her head, Renee headed for the door.
The small clearing they found offered privacy from pedestrians, but felt wrong nevertheless. Backs of buildings surrounded three sides of the patch of dirt, and a small fence in the corner blocked the pile of trash, but not its stench. The handful of youths who followed them from the tavern gathered near one of the walls. Standing with her back to them, Renee brought up her blade in salute, and let her body’s cry for exercise drown out all else.
Alec secured his stance and engaged, the weapon dancing its way toward Renee’s abdomen. She parried the attack easily. Too easily. Then again. The strikes labored to pick up speed, the rolling beat of wood on wood growing in cadence, yet stopping short of climax, as if dulled by invisible cotton. Renee lunged toward his head. Alec missed the parry and, unconcerned, reset for the next bout.
Blood pulsated in her temple. “Are you paying attention?”
“Mage zero, blinder one! Scary.” The sideline jeers rose between them.
Alec rolled his eyes. She glared, and his gaze chilled in reply. When he attacked, his blade sailed full force. Renee redirected the strike moments before it could welt her arm. Her breath stilled in surprise, but he granted her no time for reflection. A second attack followed, and a third, each pregnant with power. She switched her stance to favor the speed-based game Savoy had taught her, staying ahead of the blows whose force she couldn’t match. The fight morphed from dance to death match. Pouring her frustrations into action, she met him step for step, countering his strength with angles of her blade. It was exhilarating. And frightening.
Pivoting from another savage strike, Renee wondered who this cold-eyed boy was, and whether his emerging new world had space left for her. Contemplation led to a misstep. Unable to redirect his attack, she raised her sword to meet the blow straight on. The blades locked above her head, his pressing down, hers up. Renee’s arms trembled against the pressure until, slowly, Alec overpowered her with brute strength.
The swords touched her head. The audience cheered. Alec studied the ground, his face a stone.
A cold wind ruffled Renee’s sweat-soaked hair and stung her eyes. Wiping a sleeve across her face, she took a moment to readjust her blade, unwilling to feel anything beyond the chill air and slippery wood. He wanted to play this game? Very well. Let him. Looking up, she saw him backing away. “Exhausted?” she demanded.
“Ooooh! Challenge!” shouted the ever-helpful sideline. But this time its rally wasn’t unanimous.
“It’s cold,” a voice complained.
“Agreed. Enough toying with the blinder, Alec.”
The stillness of her face faltered, her knuckles went white. Renee twisted around and pierced the spectators with her eyes. “Toying?”
The black-curled boy, Ivan, shrugged. “It’s too cold for this game.” When she continued staring, he rolled his eyes. “You’re waving a wooden stick around.”
“Want to try?”
“Renee, don’t.” Alec stepped beside her. “You don’t understand.”
Her heart pounded in her ears. “No, he doesn’t understand.” Nor do you. Plucking the practice sword from Alec’s hand, she tossed it to the challenger. “Come play.”
The boy’s smug grin grew wide when he caught the blade. He stepped out in front of her, mocked a salute, and stumbled into a semblance of a fighting stance. His sword wavered, threatening to crash from his hand. Bringing up her weapon, Renee decided to start with disarming the bastard.
Her attack never happened. The moment she moved, the boy’s free hand shot a stream of blue flame that turned Renee’s sword into a torch. She dropped the burning wood while Ivan hooted and laughed, his mirth spreading to the audience.
“I tried to warn you,” Alec said quietly.
Renee caught amusement dancing across his face. The betrayal pierced like steel. She backed away, one step, then another, unsure where she had left to go. The sounds of the world blended and muted. She saw the other mages’ lips move, but couldn’t spare the effort to make out the words. Turning on her heels, she fled the yard.
Renee sprinted through Catar’s streets. When pedestrians shouted at her back, she chose emptier corridors, heedless of direction, heedless of everything but the pounding of her feet and the cold air filling her lungs. A bend took her down a dead-end street. She shifted to run back and froze.
“Looks like I got me lucky,” slurred a man whose wine-stained shirt hung half-tucked from his britches. Behind him, a half dozen others cheered agreement. Patting one another’s shoulders, they spread across the width of the corridor, blocking her route.
The man advanced.
Renee retreated until her back hit the wall and the stench of cheap spirits filled her nostrils.
CHAPTER 28
br />
Awareness brushed Savoy like a puff of wind. His body ached with a deep, nagging pain that seeped into each muscle fiber. The burn on his hand had disappeared. He pushed himself up, panted from the exertion, and looked around.
He sat in a cage, two spans square—scarcely tall enough for Savoy’s height—that stood inside a larger room. He wore only white drawstring trousers and, around his wrists and neck, flat bands of leather interwoven with blue-tinted metal strips and rings. The leather chafed, but in light of a previously certain death, he lacked grounds to complain.
“I’ve neither time nor desire to break a new pup, Jasper.” A large, muscular man carrying a coiled hemp whip at his waist entered the room. He was in his mid-thirties and hard, the kind of hard that grows from experience. Crossing meaty arms, the man weighed Savoy with his eyes and scoffed when Savoy returned the look glare for glare.
“Make time,” said the man’s partner, a scrawny adolescent whose peach-fuzz cheeks had unlikely yet met a razor. “Mother said I could have him.” The boy adjusted his glasses and squatted to Savoy’s eye level. “Hi, Cat. I’m Jasper, your keeper. That’s your training master, Den. Don’t be frightened.”
Cat? Savoy studied the smiling youth who saved him the trouble of creating an identity and hoped he had found the weaker link.
“I named you for your green eyes,” Jasper continued.
Savoy glanced at Den to measure his reaction, but the man showed none. Instead, he and Jasper began to back away. Something was about to happen. Savoy tensed. Jasper smiled and raised his hand.
It glowed blue.
Savoy’s bracelets shimmered in reply and started to pull.
A wave of foreboding washed over him as the glowing bands dragged his wrists up and back, gluing his arms to the back of his collar. Savoy fought the restraints, but the invisible force sheared through the struggle, twisting joints and muscles into compliance, tearing the skin beneath the leather to blood.
Jasper’s hand flashed once more, the light reflecting off his glasses. The three bands dragged their prisoner backward, forcing him to move his feet or fall, and slammed him against the metal cage. Savoy glared at Jasper and gritted his teeth.
Den entered the cage and clipped a rope to the bands holding Savoy. Immediately, the glow coming from Jasper’s hand died, releasing the strain on Savoy’s wrists.
“You going to cause a problem?” Den growled into Savoy’s ear and, arching him backward, marched him out and down a corridor, similar to the one that once led to Diam’s cage.
They came to a large room where two rows of cots lined the walls. Six men, dressed in identical white pants, pinned him with hate-filled glares.
“You sleep there.” Den pointed to an empty cot next to a bald, mountain-sized man. Then he retrieved a piece of chalk from his pocket and wrote “Cat, evaluation care” on the slate affixed to the footboard.
A man with a scar running down his face cleared his throat. “We already got six.”
“Don’t you worry, Pretty. We’ll return to six soon enough.” Den unclipped the rope and left without further word.
Savoy crossed his arms and regarded his cellmates. Predators. “It usually takes people longer to dislike me.”
“How long?” Mountain Man asked with surprising sincerity.
“Shut up, Boulder.” Pretty looked Savoy up and down. “You really this clueless?”
“No, I enjoy putting on shows of ignorance.”
“White Team has six slots and, now, seven pups,” said a third man, joining the conversation. The sign on his bed named him Farmer.
Pretty bared his teeth. “Which means, little blond boy, one of us awaits a death match.”
“My sympathies to you then, Pretty.” Savoy sat on the thin, blanket-covered mattress and tugged at his wristbands, careful of the raw flesh beneath.
“Don’t bother,” Farmer mumbled, motioning to Savoy’s wrists. “There’s only one way out of here.”
“Death?”
“Two ways out, then. The Predator who wins fourth tier finals gets his freedom. If you need a delusion of hope to cling to, use that.”
Looking up, Savoy found the man’s eyes and nodded his thanks, adding the new scrap of information to his pitifully small pile.
A few hours later, Savoy was herded into a training salle. Beautiful. That was the only word for it. Equipment shone with polish and begged for use. Clean, raked sand covered the floor evenly. Cords marked off sparring rings. Ropes, pull-up bars, free weights, punching bags, leather strike pads, all emanated maintenance and care. The Academy’s salle, one of the finest the Crown had, paled in comparison, like a starved pony next to Kye.
Boulder, the large, slow-witted man, paced beside a pile of rocks.
“Don’t touch Boulder’s stones.” Farmer caught Savoy’s arm. “He’ll wail all morning.”
The giant did look attached. Every few seconds, he stopped pacing and squatted down, stroking one rock or another as if they were puppies. Watching him mumble and brush stray grains of sand from one gray pet, Savoy thought of Diam, who used to play like that, turning twigs and pebbles into horses and warriors. The man looked up, eyes full of innocence and caution, and grimaced at Pretty, who swaggered in his direction.
“Don’t hurt ’em.” Boulder stood guard in front of his pile.
Pretty grinned. He reached down and gathered a handful of sand. “Sand’s just a bunch of dead rocks, did you know that?” he asked, while Boulder shuffled from foot to foot, wringing large hands together. Without waiting for a reply, Pretty cocked his arm for a throw.
Savoy caught it.
“Cat, don’t!” Farmer called out, but Savoy already twisted Pretty’s wrist and drove him to the ground. He straddled the man’s chest and cocked a fist, ready to reshape Pretty’s nose.
The blow never connected. Instead, the instant before his fist descended, the bands around Savoy’s wrists tightened, shimmering with blue glow.
“I see we have a problem.” Den’s voice said behind him.
Turning, Savoy saw the training master a few yards away, pointing an amulet in his direction. A line of light stretched like a leash, from the amulet to his bands. Den jerked the leash, ripping Savoy off Pretty.
Savoy landed face-first in the sand and sat up, spitting the grains from his mouth. The next moment, his wrists pulled up to the collar, and the leather pieces glued together. Savoy met Den’s gaze and threw a dirty look at the amulet. “Coward.”
“Idiot.”
“One doesn’t negate the other.”
“Don’t try me.”
“Don’t worry. I’m tied up at the moment.”
Den tapped his hand against his thigh and stared at Savoy, who braced himself for a blow. No strike came. Instead, the training master squeezed the amulet and the glow died, releasing the restraints. Den shook his head and pointed toward one of the sparring rings. “We’ll do this once, Cat. And only once.”
Savoy rubbed his wrists and rose, aware of the silence settling around them. His hand reached for a nonexistent sword and he covered the misstep by dusting sand off his trousers. Den’s invitation reminded him of how he himself handled rookies, which suggested that one of the two of them was in for a surprise. Meanwhile, Den unhooked the rope-whip from his waist and rested it on the ground. When he stepped into the ring, boredom played in his eyes.
“Begin.”
Savoy brought his right leg back and bladed his body into a fighting stance. His weight shifted, and his hands rose to protect his head. Den crouched and shot in, moving faster than Savoy had expected from a large man more than a decade older than him. Savoy sprawled back from the attack, shoved Den’s shoulders, and danced away. Den came at him again, an odd frontal assault that would have gotten him skewered had Savoy had so much as a toothpick. But a weapon he did not hav
e, and Den cut him at the knees.
Savoy slapped the ground as he fell, landing without injury. Newfound respect formed in his mind. The man knew his sport. Fighting for top position, Savoy tried to rise, but Den twisted him onto his back and knelt atop him, driving his knee into Savoy’s stomach. The effect was immediate and miserable. Pressure on his midsection made each breath an effort. Savoy looked up, knowing that little stopped Den from punching his head. Den returned the gaze. But he didn’t strike. Instead, the knee cinched tighter and tighter each time Savoy exhaled. Fighting for air, he struggled to twist his body out from underneath his heavier opponent. He succeeded only in relocating the knee a hand-width higher. It now pressed on his floating ribs. Savoy could draw air now, but the agony of straining bone overwhelmed the joy of breathing.
Collecting his strength, Savoy braced his hands against Den’s knee. He twisted sideways and out, shoving himself free from under the other’s weight. Maintaining momentum, he rolled to his feet and kicked. Den rocked back, a trickle of blood tracing his chin. Savoy’s chest heaved as he circled, looking for his next opening. He saw it and kicked again, aiming a roundhouse at the man’s temple. Had the blow connected, its impact would have knocked Den unconscious. It didn’t happen that way.
Den blocked the strike with the point of his elbow and wrapped his arms around the leg. He twisted, jerked Savoy off balance, and forced him back to the ground. This time, when Savoy slapped the sand to disperse the force of the fall, Den attacked the outstretched arm. The pressure on Savoy’s shoulder came sudden and hard, like a door slam. Den torqued the joint again and fire raced through limb. Savoy had no escape but to tear his own rotator cuff. He drew a breath.
“Tap out, moron.”
The pressure increased, muscles and tendons straining from the pull.
“I said, tap. Unless you fight better with severed muscles.”
Swallowing his pride, Savoy raised his free hand and struck the ground. The pressure ceased, but the fire remained. Shaking out his shoulder, Savoy hopped to his feet, determined to improve his performance in the next round.