Chapter 71

Chapter 71: Chapter 71

On Wednesday evening, Master Toris waited until the sun was completely gone behind the western ridges before he called the sixteen remaining squads out to the staging yard.

By five-thirty, the sky over the lake was the color of an old iron skillet, and the wind coming down from the northern hills had dried the Monday slush into hard, noisy ruts that crunched under our heels like broken crockery.

Around the perimeter of the yard, the maintenance crews had lit pitch torches in iron baskets, though the light only reached twenty feet into the pines before the dark swallowed it up. Up in the viewing pavilion, the green wool curtains were drawn partway back so Duke Ramiro and the War Ministry generals could watch the scoreboard through brass spyglasses while servants carried around trays of hot mulled wine.

We stood near the equipment sleds by Gate Six, wrapping strips of grey scrap wool around our scabbard buckles and iron belt rings so they wouldn’t clink when we ran.

Ten yards away, standing near the horse lines with his hands tucked into the fur-lined cuffs of his sky-blue coat, Captain Varga of Sospurro was talking in a low voice to Marcus Redgrave.

Redgrave was already dressed in his padded leather vest, his heavy practice spear resting against his shoulder while his three squadmates—Boyd, Soren, and his archer, Ellis—checked their gear by the lantern post.

"I don’t care which first-year squad they beat on Monday, Cadet," Varga was saying in his clipped, nasal accent, loud enough to carry over the wind whenever the horses shifted their feet. "My uncle needs four vanguard units attached to the river forts at Oakhaven by April, and I am not putting first-year border trash on my supply roster just to humor Lord Lorenzo’s friends in the Ministry. Finish them inside ten minutes so the Duke can go back to his quarters before his gout flares up."

Redgrave didn’t bow or click his heels the way some of the younger noble cadets did around the foreign officers. He just looked down his scarred nose at Varga with calm, borderline bored politeness.

"We’ll clear the sector on our own schedule, Captain," Redgrave said evenly. "And my squad isn’t signing onto your river forts until we see the spring deployment warrants from Headmaster Corvus. Excuse me."

Redgrave turned his back on the Sospurro officer before Varga could answer and walked back over to his men. Varga’s mustache twitched, an ugly flush creeping up his thin neck, before he spun on his riding heel and marched back toward the steps of the heated pavilion.

"Look at that," Luckas murmured, tying a knot in the grey cloth wrapped around his scabbard chape. "Redgrave might be an arrogant bastard, but at least he doesn’t kiss foreign boots. I almost feel bad that we’re going to knock him out of the brackets."

"Wait until we actually knock him out before you feel bad for him," Kaelen said. He was rubbing wet charcoal dust mixed with mutton tallow across the backs of his pale hands and down the bridge of his nose so his skin wouldn’t catch the starlight in the trees. He held the greasy tin out to Luckas. "Do your forehead and your chin. You’re paler than I am."

Luckas made a face, though he scooped two fingers into the black grease and smeared it across his cheekbones. "If my mother saw me right now, she’d have the kennel master hose me down in the stable yard."

Up on the watchtower, Master Toris banged his wooden gavel twice against the iron railing instead of using the whistle.

"Round Two! Night Reconnaissance!" Toris’s voice boomed out through the brass horn. "Eight sectors! No torches, no alchemical flares! In the center of each sector hangs an unlit iron lantern on a six-foot timber post! To win the sector, your squad must reach the post, light the oil wick inside the lantern with your own Ember, and keep that flame burning for three full minutes—or chalk out three of the four opposing cadets! If anyone breaks the lantern glass or knocks the post down, their squad forfeits on the spot! Move to your gates!"

We walked up to the wooden bars of Gate Six alongside Redgrave’s unit.

Sector Six wasn’t creek bottom like the Old Mill Bridge. It was the Old Quarry—a half-mile stretch of terraced granite ledges on the eastern side of the Bramble where the masons had cut stone for the dormitories eighty years ago. The middle of the quarry was a deep, flat-bottomed stone bowl cluttered with piles of waste rock, rusted iron derricks, and a long stone drainage spillway that carried runoff water down to the lake.

Ellis, Redgrave’s archer, stood three feet away from me while the proctor checked our chalked weapons.

He was a lean, quiet third-year with long arms and leather finger-tabs strapped to his right hand. Over his shoulder he carried a heavy recurve bow made of laminated horn, and his quiver was full of thick ash shafts tipped not with flat leather pads like the first-year arrows, but with heavy, rounded iron blunts the size of a walnut, smeared thickly with wet red grease-chalk.

If one of those iron blunts hit you in the ribs at forty yards from an eighty-pound horn bow, it wouldn’t pierce your padded vest, though it would crack a rib right through the leather and leave you gasping in the snow.

Redgrave glanced sideways at Nia as the proctor lifted the wooden bar on Gate Six.

"Remember your spare boots, Valerius?" Redgrave asked mildly.

"In my locker, Redgrave," Nia said, shifting her short boar-spear into her right hand and her twelve-inch iron buckler into her left. "Right next to the towel I brought for you."

"See you at the lantern," Redgrave said. His squad starts from the south rim of the quarry; ours started from the north trail. He turned and trotted off along the perimeter path with his three men toward the south entrance.

Once we were inside the north gate, waiting by our starting stake for the horn to sound, the dark under the pine canopy was thick enough that I could barely see the white breath coming out of Luckas’s mouth four feet away.

"All right," I whispered, crouching down in the frozen pine needles with the three of them huddled close. "Tell me how Redgrave plays this."

"He won’t touch the lantern," Kaelen said immediately. "Lighting the lantern in the bottom of the pit means standing next to a bright light in an open stone bowl while the other team shoots at you from the dark ledges. Redgrave is going to put Ellis up on the second quarry terrace with that horn bow and wait for us to go down and light it."

"And if we don’t go down and light it?" Luckas asked.

"Then after five minutes, Redgrave and his two heavy hitters—Boyd and Soren—will sweep the ledges in a three-man wedge to hunt us down while Ellis covers them from the high rock," I said. "And the second you spark your sword to block them in the dark, Luckas, Ellis puts an iron blunt right into your chestplate from fifty yards away."

Luckas grimaced in the dark. "So no fire."

"Not a spark from you until Ellis is out of the match," I said. "Not even to warm your hands. If you light up, we lose."

"Then how do we find Ellis on the ledges without getting shot?" Nia asked quietly. "And how do we keep Redgrave’s three heavies off us while you hunt the archer?"

I reached into my belt pouch and pulled out three two-inch stubs of tallow candle—the leftover ends from Luckas’s breathing lessons in the courtyard—and handed them to Nia.

"You’re going to light the candles, Nia," I said.

Nia blinked down at the little wax stubs in her mitten. "Me? I thought you just said anyone who lights a flame gets shot."

"Anyone who holds a flame in their hand gets shot," I corrected. "When we get down to the bottom edge of the quarry, near the old drainage spillway where the ice is thin over the water trough, you’re going to stick those three candles on the flat rocks behind the rubble piles, warm the wicks from ten feet away using small thermal threads the way Maren taught us, and duck back behind the stone wall with Luckas. From up on the ridge, through the snow flurries, three small flames low to the ground look just like someone trying to shield a fire with their cloak while warming up their hands before a push."

Luckas’s teeth flashed faintly in the dark as he grinned. "Redgrave thinks Nia is our weak link anyway. If he sees low, weak heat down by the spillway rocks, he’ll think she and I got separated from you two in the dark, and he’ll bring Boyd and Soren straight down the chute to chalk us out fast."

"And when he runs down the spillway ramp in the dark," Nia whispered, her eyes brightening behind her charcoal-smeared cheeks, "he doesn’t know the mason’s drainage trench under the snow crust is three feet deep and full of slush."

"Keep your buckler up and don’t let him get his spear point under your guard while he’s falling," I told her. "Kaelen and I will clear the high terrace and come down behind him inside four minutes."

Across the woods, Toris’s great brass horn blew one long, mournful note that echoed off the granite cliffs.

We moved out immediately, keeping off the packed gravel cart-track where our boots would crunch and sliding instead through the calf-deep drift snow along the tree line.

Within three minutes, the pines ended at the lip of the Old Quarry.

Even in the dark, the place looked like a giant had taken an axe to the hillside. Three wide, jagged shelves of grey granite dropped down twenty feet at a time into a flat stone basin eighty yards wide. In the very center of the basin, hanging from a wooden gallows-post planted in a pile of crushed rock, the unlit iron lantern swung back and forth in the wind with a dry, rhythmic squeak-squeak of its rusty hook.

Nobody went near it.

"Luckas, Nia—take the west ramp down to the spillway," I breathed, touching Luckas’s elbow. "Give us ninety seconds to work around the east terrace before you light the first wick."

Luckas nodded once, his hand resting on the hilt of his unlit longsword, and disappeared down the dark stone cut with Nia right behind his shoulder.

Kaelen and I stayed high on the top rim, moving east with our backs brushed against the vertical stone wall of the upper cut.

I didn’t open the Rune of Antiquity. If I let the starlight bleed into my right eye out here on the open granite face, an archer with good night vision would spot the pale glow under my hood from a hundred yards off. Instead, I kept my chin tucked down, breathing through my nose so my breath wouldn’t frost in the air, and listened.

The wind in a stone quarry doesn’t blow straight; it swirls around the corners and hums across the sharp edges of the cut rock. Beneath the wind, about sixty yards ahead of us on the middle terrace, I heard the tiny, unmistakable clink of an iron heel-plate shifting on bare stone, followed by the soft creak of stiff horn being flexed by a gloved hand.

Ellis was right where Kaelen said he’d be—crouched behind a chest-high block of split granite on the middle shelf, forty feet above the quarry floor, with a clear field of fire over both the central lantern and the western drainage ramp.

And he wasn’t alone.

Standing ten feet below him on the ramp leading up to his perch was Soren, a broad-shouldered third-year carrying a five-foot two-handed wooden maul, left behind by Redgrave to make sure no scout crept up the steps to stab his archer in the back.

Kaelen crouched beside my knee behind a frozen pile of quarry gravel and held up two fingers, pointing first at Soren on the steps, then up at Ellis on the ledge.

Just then, down at the far western bottom of the quarry basin near the frozen drainage trough, a tiny yellow pinpoint of light flickered to life behind a waist-high pile of broken slate. Two seconds later, a second small flame sparked three feet to its left.

Up on the granite block ahead of us, Ellis shifted his weight immediately, rising to one knee and lifting his heavy horn bow as he sighted down across the basin toward the tiny lights.

Further down on the south floor of the quarry, two dark shapes—Redgrave and Boyd, moving fast and low with their spears held at the trail—detached themselves from the shadow of an old iron derrick and began trotting quietly across the basin floor toward the western spillway, using the rubble piles to stay out of sight of the candle flames.

"Now," I whispered.

We didn’t have time to crawl around Soren. If we waited another thirty seconds, Redgrave and Boyd would be on top of Luckas and Nia, and Ellis would put an arrow into the spillway the second anyone stood up to fight.

I pulled a fist-sized chunk of frozen granite rubble out of the snow pile by my boot, rose to a half-crouch, and lobbed it in a high, silent arc thirty feet past Soren’s right ear, out over the empty middle of the quarry pit.

The rock hit a rusted sheet of corrugated iron roofing leaning against an old tool shed down on the quarry floor with a deafening CLANG that echoed off all four walls like a dropped anvil.

Soren spun around on the stone steps toward the pit floor, lifting his heavy wooden maul across his chest as he peered down at the tool shed. "What was that?"

Up on the ledge, Ellis didn’t take his eyes off the western spillway, keeping his bow drawn halfway back. "Probably a loose rock or the scout trying to bait the lantern! Watch the steps, Soren!"

Soren started to turn his head back toward our side of the terrace.

He was half a second too late.

I didn’t run down the open stone steps where he was looking. I took three hard strides along the upper ledge directly above his head and dropped straight off the eight-foot granite cut onto the narrow landing behind his back.

I didn’t land on my heels. I hit the snow on the balls of my feet with my knees bent deep to eat the shock, my wooden bastard sword already swinging in a short, flat backhand stroke aimed not at Soren’s padded chest—where the thick leather vest would dull the blow—but straight across the back of his left knee.

The heavy ash blade cracked against his hamstring hard enough to fold his leg out from under him. As Soren went down on one knee with a muffled grunt, trying to swing his heavy maul backward over his shoulder to catch my head, I stepped on the head of his maul with my left boot to pin it to the snow and dragged the red-chalked edge of my sword cleanly across the front of his throat guard.

Up on the granite block ten feet above us, Ellis heard the thud of Soren’s knee hitting the rock.

The archer didn’t waste time yelling for Redgrave. He pivoted on his knee like a weathervane, swinging the notched iron-blunt arrow away from the basin floor and aiming straight down at my chest from ten feet up.

At ten feet, an eighty-pound horn bow doesn’t miss, and you can’t dodge the string once it lets go.

Except Ellis had to lower his front elbow four inches to aim down the steep step—which brought his bow arm right past the dark crack between two split granite boulders where Kaelen had climbed up while I dropped onto Soren.

Before Ellis’s fingers could open on the bowstring, Kaelen’s black sleeve shot out of the gap between the rocks. He didn’t stab the archer with his wooden dagger; he slammed the heavy heel of his palm upward against the bottom horn tip of the recurve bow.

The bow jerked violently skyward just as the string snapped forward. The heavy iron-tipped shaft whistled harmlessly over my hood and sparked off the cliff wall behind me in a shower of stone dust.

Before Ellis could reach for a second arrow, Kaelen vaulted onto the top of the granite block, hooked his left heel behind the archer’s neck to pull him flat onto his back on the stone, and drew a thick red chalk line across Ellis’s collarbone.

"Two down on the east shelf!" the night proctor perched on the upper cliff wall shouted through his horn, lighting a small blue chemical stick to mark Soren and Ellis out of the match.

Down in the dark quarry basin, eighty yards away by the western drainage spillway, the shout echoed off the rocks right as Redgrave and Boyd reached the rubble pile where Nia’s three candle stubs were burning on a flat stone.

"Ambush on the shelf!" Redgrave snarled down in the dark, realizing instantly that the candles on the rock had nobody sitting behind them. "Boyd, back to the high ground—they took out Ellis!"

Redgrave and Boyd spun around in the ankle-deep snow at the mouth of the spillway, trying to sprint back out into the open quarry floor before Kaelen and I could come down the terrace steps behind them.

They never made it out of the spillway chute.

The moment Redgrave turned his back on the dark stone wall to the left of the drainage trough, Luckas stepped out from behind the masonry abutment without a single spark of fire on his blade, swinging his heavy wooden longsword in a silent, two-handed cleave that caught Boyd squarely across the shoulder pads as the big third-year tried to pivot.

Boyd staggered sideways from the impact, his boots skidding off the stone curb straight onto the flat, snow-covered crust hiding the three-foot-deep mason’s drainage trench.

CRACK.

The half-inch sheet of rotten ice under the snow gave way like window glass. Boyd’s right leg plunged down to the hip into freezing black slush water, twisting him around so hard that Luckas easily tapped the flat of his chalked blade across the center of Boyd’s chestplate.

"Three down!" the proctor on the west wall bellowed. "Match to First-Year Squad Seven!"

Redgrave didn’t hear the whistle in time—or else his blood was up too hot to stop his feet. As Boyd went down in the trench, Redgrave spun toward the sound of Luckas’s sword and drove his seven-foot practice spear in a furious, sliding lunge aimed straight past Luckas’s hip at Nia, who was stepping out from the shadow of the wall to cover Luckas’s left side.

Even in the dark, Redgrave’s reach was terrifyingly fast. The heavy wooden spearhead shot past Luckas’s ribs before Luckas could pull his longsword back from tagging Boyd.

Nia didn’t jump backward. Behind her was the stone wall; to her right was the open ice trench.

She dropped her chin behind the rim of her twelve-inch iron buckler, kept her fingers loose on her short boar-spear the way we had practiced by the horse trough, and punched the iron boss of her buckler upward at a forty-five-degree angle right under the iron collar of Redgrave’s incoming spear shaft.

Steel scraped loudly against wood, throwing a tiny orange spark into the dark air.

Redgrave’s spear point skated harmlessly four inches over Nia’s padded shoulder, hitting the stone wall behind her with a loud thwack.

Because Redgrave had leaned all two hundred pounds of his weight into the lunge to catch her before the whistle blew, his front foot slid forward on the wet snow lip of the spillway. As he tried to yank his spear back, Nia stepped forward—pushing a clean, sharp burst of mineral heat down into her legs—and shoved the flat edge of her iron buckler squarely into Redgrave’s left elbow.

Redgrave’s heel slid over the broken ice edge. With a loud, echoing splash that threw freezing water up onto Luckas’s boots, the Rank Fourteen captain went sideways into the drainage trench right beside Boyd, sitting down waist-deep in the slush with his spear still resting across the stone curb.

By the time Kaelen and I trotted down the stone steps from the east terrace and walked across the quarry floor, the proctor was holding up a blue lantern over the drainage trough.

Redgrave sat in the black water for three seconds without moving, snow drifting down onto the shoulders of his padded vest. Then he slowly looked up at Nia, who was standing on the dry stone curb above him, leaning on her five-foot boar-spear while trying very hard not to grin.

"You dug the snow out over the ice lip before you lit those candles, didn’t you, Valerius?" Redgrave asked, his voice remarkably steady considering he was sitting in three feet of ice water.

"I brushed a little of the thick crust off with my boot so it would break cleaner," Nia admitted politely. She reached down with her free left hand, offering him her wrist to pull himself out. "Told you the creek beds get cold, Redgrave."

Redgrave stared at her hand for a second, let out a long, gravelly sigh that turned into a cloud of white steam under the proctor’s lantern, and grabbed her wrist, letting Nia and Luckas haul him dripping and clanking back up onto the dry stones.

He shook the water off his fingers, picked up his spear, and looked across the ditch at me.

"No rune light on the terrace, and Vance didn’t light his sword once," Redgrave said, knocking a chunk of grey ice off his knee guard. "You used three copper tallow stubs to bait a third-year vanguard line into a ditch."

"Candle wax is cheap," I said, resting my wooden sword on my shoulder. "And we didn’t have to stand out in the wind for three minutes guarding that lantern."

Redgrave looked over at the unlit iron lantern still swinging and squeaking on its wooden gallows-post in the middle of the empty quarry, then gave a short, wry nod. "Beat the fourth-years in the pit tomorrow, Lieutenant. If I have to explain to my house master that I got dumped in a mud ditch by four first-years who didn’t even make the semifinals, I’m going to be running hill sprints until Easter."

We walked back up the quarry ramp together, our breaths mingling in the freezing dark as the bugles began to blow from the watchtowers to call the eight surviving quarterfinal squads back to the main pavilion.

As we came out through Gate Six into the torchlight of the staging yard, Luckas finally let a small, orange ripple of heat run down his sleeves to dry the splashed trench water off his trousers, letting out a long groan of relief.

"Do you have any idea how hard it is not to light up when a guy with a seven-foot spear is running at your face in the dark?" Luckas asked, rubbing his cold hands together over the nearest torch basket. "My thumb was twitching so hard on the grip I nearly dropped my sword."

"You held it," Kaelen said, wiping the black charcoal grease off his cheekbones with a handful of clean snow. "And you didn’t telegraph your swing by roaring like an idiot this time. Progress."

"I don’t roar like an idiot," Luckas protested. "That was a tactical battle cry in the cellar."

I stopped near the equipment sleds to unstrap my wooden training sword, looking up toward the green-curtained viewing pavilion above the yard.

Duke Ramiro had already gone inside, just like Varga said he would, leaving his empty chair by the brazier.

Standing at the front rail of the platform, however, were two people who hadn’t left early. One was Lord Lorenzo of Sospurro, his gold shoulder cords gleaming in the torchlight as he closed his little red leather notebook and tucked it into his coat. And standing three feet to his right, wearing his crimson Student Council coat with his hands in his pockets, was Aurio Gentrimio.

Aurio caught my eye across the crowded yard and didn’t smile this time. He just gave a tiny, almost imperceptible nod toward the main brackets board by the tower—where the clerks were already pinning up the quarterfinal pairings for Thursday morning in Pit One.

From here on out, there were no more trees, no more dark ledges, and no more bridges to climb under. Tomorrow morning, the last eight squads in the citadel were going into the flat sand circle with nowhere to hide.