Chapter 72 - 73

Chapter 72: Chapter 73

Sorry for the mix-up; the next Chapter is the one before this, so read before Chapter 72 and after this.

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Nia had a bruise the size of a dinner plate running from the bottom of her left shoulder blade down to her hip.

When she pulled her flannel nightshirt over her head on Friday morning to put on her linen chest-wrap, the skin over her ribs was a mottled patchwork of dark purple and yellow-green from where she had clamped Julian Falk’s broadsword under her elbow the day before.

"Hold your breath a second," I said, pulling the wide linen bandage tight around her ribs and pinning the end with two flat brass safety pins. "Can you lift your left arm above your ear?"

Nia raised her elbow halfway up, winced once as the bruised muscle pulled across the bone, and forced her hand the rest of the way up until her fingers touched the top of her braided curls.

"It goes up," she said, letting her breath out slowly. "Just feels like somebody kicked me with an iron boot. Once we get warmed up, I won’t notice it."

"Don’t try that elbow-clamp again today," I told her, tossing her padded wool undershirt onto the bed. "We drew Squad Two for the nine-o’clock semifinal. Seraphina Vorne and Titus Mercer are both on that line. If you try trapping Mercer’s halberd under your arm, he’ll just pick you up off the ground with the shaft and throw you over the wall."

"I thought Mercer wasn’t in the top ten anymore," Nia said, buttoning her grey tunic with stiff fingers.

"He’s Rank Eleven, though he’s still in Seraphina’s four-man training unit from last year," I said, strapping my leather bracers over my sleeves. "Along with Hektor Vane on the heavy shield and Mara Galt on the whip-staff. Their combined average rank is fourteen."

We didn’t eat in the main dining hall that morning. The noise before the semifinals was always too loud, and half the third-years whose money we had won yesterday kept coming over to ask Luckas about the terrain in Pit One. Instead, Kaelen brought a loaf of brown bread, a wedge of hard yellow goat cheese, and four boiled eggs down to the gear benches behind the bathhouse where it was quiet.

Luckas was sitting on a wooden water bucket with a flat sharpening stone in his hand—not sharpening his blunt tournament sword, since that was against the rules, just smoothing out a jagged bur on the flat edge where Brenn’s billhook had dented the steel yesterday so it wouldn’t catch on a shield rim.

"I walked past the fourth-year racks ten minutes ago," Luckas said, slicing a piece of goat cheese with his pocketknife and popping it into his mouth. "Mercer got a new ash shaft fitted onto his halberd head last night. And guess what he did to the iron reinforcing straps along the grip?"

"Wrapped them in dry leather," Kaelen said, peeling an egg.

"Two layers of thick pigskin, laced tight with waxed hemp cord," Luckas confirmed, pointing his knife at me. "You won’t be able to shock his thumb through the steel today, Elvit. And he spent twenty minutes in the practice ring last night practicing low sweeps against short-spears."

"He thinks I’m going to line up across from him again while Nia backs me up," I said, taking a piece of bread from Kaelen’s paper wrapper.

"Aren’t you?" Nia asked, tying her bootlaces.

"No," I said. "You and Luckas are taking Mercer and Hektor on the right side."

Luckas stopped his sharpening stone halfway down his blade and looked up at me. "Me against the seven-foot halberd?"

"Mercer’s earth-trenches ruined my sprint on Saturday because I don’t have a long-range way to push him back while I climb out of a ditch," I explained, drawing two lines in the sawdust on the bathhouse floor with the toe of my boot. "You do. If he stamps the clay to tear up the footing in front of you, you don’t have to step into the trench—you can throw a five-foot wave of fire straight across the ditch into his face and force him to raise his guard while Nia hooks Hektor’s shield rim."

"And who takes Seraphina?" Luckas asked, his brow furrowing. "Elvit, nobody outside the fourth-year class has ever forced Vorne to use two hands on her sword. She beat Redgrave’s whole squad in four minutes on Wednesday without getting a speck of dust on her cuffs."

"Kaelen and I will keep her busy," I said. "We don’t have to beat Seraphina. The rules only say we need two eliminations to take the match. If Kaelen and I chalk out Mara Galt and keep Seraphina off your backs while you two pin either Mercer or Hektor, the bell rings and we go to Saturday."

Kaelen wiped the egg crumbs off his fingers onto his black trousers and nodded once. "Mara Galt carries a six-foot segmented iron staff on a chain link. She swings wide from behind Vorne’s left shoulder. If you crowd Vorne’s front guard so she can’t step back, I can cut inside the chain’s swing radius and take Galt inside a minute."

"One minute," Luckas said, sliding his blunt longsword back into its scabbard and standing up with a roll of his shoulders. "All right. Let’s go see if Mercer likes fire better than lightning."

The clouds had blown off the lake overnight, leaving the Friday morning sky a pale, cloudless winter blue that made the frost on the stone benches glitter like salt.

When we walked out into the yellow sand of Pit One at nine o’clock, there wasn’t an empty seat anywhere in the twelve tiers. Even Headmaster Corvus was sitting in the center chair of the faculty awning today, his black wool robes draped over the railing whileDuke Ramiro and the Sospurro lords sat in their fur pelts fifty feet to his left, and Aurio Gentrimio leaned alone on the stone parapet of the Student Council box—his own squad having already won the eight-o’clock semifinal in less than three minutes against a third-year unit.

Across the sixty-foot circle, Squad Two stood on the eastern chalk line.

Seraphina Vorne wasn’t wearing her wire-rimmed reading spectacles today. Her long black hair was braided tightly down her back and tucked inside the high collar of her padded fourth-year vest so nobody could grab it in a grapple. In her right hand, she carried a rebated tournament estoc—a forty-inch, three-sided spike of rigid, square-section steel with no cutting edge at all, meant purely for driving a blunt iron button the size of a hazelnut through the gaps in an opponent’s guard with enough leverage to crack ribs.

Beside her, Titus Mercer rolled his newly hafted seven-foot halberd in his pigskin-wrapped grip, looking straight across the sand at me with a steady, expectant scowl. On his right stood Hektor Vane with a heavy round iron targe strapped to his forearm, and behind Seraphina’s left hip stood Mara Galt, slowly looping a two-foot iron flail-head attached to an ash staff around her wrist.

While the arena warden checked the chalk on our blades in the center of the ring, I didn’t line up on the left side opposite Mercer the way I had in the quarterfinals.

Five seconds before the warden stepped back to the wall, I traded places with Luckas on the chalk line, putting myself and Kaelen directly across from Seraphina and Mara Galt.

Thirty feet away, Mercer’s scowl darkened as he realized he was staring at Luckas’s midnight-blue tunic instead of my grey cloak. He started to shift his boots to his left to follow me across the line.

"Stay on your mark, Titus," Seraphina said. Her voice wasn’t loud, though in the dead quiet before the whistle, it carried clearly across the packed clay. "If you cross my front line after the flag drops, you’ll block Mara’s chain. Take Vance."

Mercer grunted, planting his heavy boots back on the right side of their line and lowering his halberd shaft.

The warden raised the red flag high over his head.

"Semifinal Bout Two! Two eliminations decide the field!" the warden shouted. "Fight!"

The flag dropped.

Nobody on Seraphina’s side rushed forward. Instead, the instant Mercer slammed the butt of his halberd into the right half of the arena—tearing two jagged, knee-deep ruts across the clay in front of Luckas and Nia—Seraphina took three calm, measured strides out into the center left of the circle and touched the blunt iron tip of her estoc lightly to the sand.

I felt her Ember hit the air ten feet before I reached her.

It wasn’t a solid wall like Julian’s warding stakes. It felt like walking out of a warm kitchen straight into a cellar flooded with January well-water.

A pale, colourless mist no higher than my ankles rolled outward from the tip of Seraphina’s sword across the yellow clay. The temperature on our side of the pit dropped twenty degrees in two heartbeats. My breath froze white in my throat, burning my windpipe like I was inhaling crushed glass, and the sweat inside my leather gauntlets went instantly icy against my skin.

Beside me, Kaelen’s boots hit the edge of the low mist half a stride ahead of mine.

Because Kaelen didn’t have the heavy internal furnace of a front-line Swelled Bud, the cold sank straight through his thin black boots into his calves. His stride hitched by two inches as his leg muscles stiffened in the sudden freeze.

That two-inch hitch was all Seraphina needed.

She didn’t swing her estoc; she slid her front boot forward over the frosted clay like an ice-skater and drove the rigid three-sided steel spike straight at the hollow of Kaelen’s right shoulder with terrifying, whip-crack speed.

Kaelen couldn’t get his twin shortswords crossed in time with his legs chilled.

I didn’t try to parry her point from the side—an estoc is too stiff and narrow to knock off line with a flat slap if you aren’t directly in front of it. Instead, I shoved my left hand straight into the back of Kaelen’s padded vest, throwing him sideways out of the line of her thrust toward Mara Galt, while stepping straight into the space he had just left and catching the thick middle section of Seraphina’s square blade against the crossguard of my blunt bastard sword.

Clang.

The impact didn’t push me back the way Toma’s shield had, though the moment her steel touched my crossguard, a wave of numbing, marrow-deep cold shot straight through the iron hilt into my bruised left forearm and my acid-scarred right palm.

My fingers went instantly white and stiff inside my gloves, the skin losing all feeling from the knuckles to the wrist.

Before I could twist my sword to lock her blade down, Seraphina disengaged with a tiny, effortless circular flick of her wrist—sliding her narrow point out from under my crossguard before my stiff fingers could follow—and drove a second thrust two inches lower, right at the center of my breastbone.

I barely pivoted my ribs in time. The red-chalked iron button on the tip of her estoc glanced off the curved leather side-buckle of my vest without leaving a full chest stripe, though the sheer, dense pressure behind her thrust bruised two of my ribs hard enough to make me grunt.

First stripe if she touches me again, I thought, forcing the furnace in my chest wide open and dumping a rough, unthrottled surge of heat straight down both arms just to keep my fingers from freezing shut around my grip.

Over on the right half of the circle, the air was the exact opposite of ours.

Mercer had ripped up the clay floor into three ragged trenches, expecting Luckas to slow down at the edge the way I had on Saturday.

Luckas didn’t step into the trench at all.

He planted his heels on the lip of the first ditch, held his longsword in both hands across his chest, and blew a roaring, ten-foot sheet of orange flame straight across the broken dirt into Mercer’s and Hektor’s faces.

The blast of heat was loud enough to drown out the crowd, turning the frost on the clay into a thick white fog of boiling steam that completely blinded the right side of the ring.

"Push through the steam, Hektor!" Mercer’s voice roared inside the white cloud, swinging his seven-foot halberd blindly in a wide horizontal arc to keep Luckas from jumping the ditch. "He can’t hold that heat for a full minute!"

He was right—Luckas couldn’t keep throwing open-furnace fire without burning out his lungs in forty seconds.