Chapter 74

Chapter 74: Chapter 74

Except Luckas wasn’t standing behind the fire anymore.

While Mercer’s halberd whistled through the empty steam cloud at chest height, Nia and Luckas had already ducked down into the knee-deep trench Mercer himself had dug for them, running bent-kneed along the bottom of the ditch right under the sweep of the long polearm.

They popped up out of the dirt right at Hektor Vane’s boots on the far side of the rut.

Hektor saw Luckas’s dark blue tunic rising out of the steam three feet in front of him and swung his heavy round iron targe around to bash Luckas back into the hole, raising his blunt broadsword to chop down at Luckas’s neck.

Because Hektor turned his shield forty degrees to his left to meet Luckas, he exposed the unshielded right side of his ribs to the trench behind him.

Nia didn’t even climb out of the ditch. She braced her back hip against the broken clay wall of Mercer’s rut, used her iron buckler to knock the dangling tail of Mercer’s halberd shaft six inches to the side as the big fourth-year tried to pivot back, and drove her five-foot boar-spear upward with both hands straight into the center of Hektor’s chestplate.

The blunt wooden head hit Hektor hard enough to lift his front toes an inch off the dirt, leaving a thick, four-inch smear of bright red grease-chalk dead across his sternum.

As Hektor staggered backward from Nia’s spear thrust, Luckas didn’t swing at Mercer; he spun off Hektor’s shield rim and slapped the red-chalked flat of his hot longsword twice in half a second—whack, whack—across Hektor’s right shoulder and stomach before the big fourth-year could bring his sword down.

"Three marks on Vane!" the east wall judge shouted, waving his red flag through the drifting steam. "Hektor Vane is out!"

One down. One more to win the match.

Ten feet to my left, Kaelen was already moving to get the second one.

When I had shoved him out of the way of Seraphina’s first thrust, Kaelen had rolled across the frosted sand right under the whistling arc of Mara Galt’s six-foot iron flail-staff.

Mara was fast for a fourth-year heavy, snapping the heavy iron chain back with a jerk of her left elbow so the blunt iron weight came flying back toward the back of Kaelen’s neck on the rebound.

Kaelen didn’t try to dodge the rebound. As the chain whistled back toward his shoulders, he raised his left shortsword vertically behind his back and let the iron chain wrap itself twice around his blunt steel blade, yanking his own left arm violently backward with a wrench that made him grit his teeth—while using his right hand to lunge straight forward inside the shortened length of her staff.

Before Mara could let go of the wooden handle and pull her side-dagger, Kaelen kicked the inside of her front ankle to drop her to one knee in the frost and drew three rapid, overlapping red chalk lines across the front of her vest with his right blade.

"Wait—behind you, Kaelen!" Nia screamed from the trench across the ring.

Before the judge on the west wall could even raise his flag to call Mara out, Seraphina Vorne made her move.

She knew the instant Kaelen wrapped Mara’s chain around his left sword that Mara was lost. She didn’t try to save her teammate; she tried to trade Kaelen out in the exact same heartbeat so the match would stay one-to-one.

To get to Kaelen before the judge blew the whistle on Mara, she had to go through me.

Seraphina dropped her weight low, her dark eyes cold and completely calm, and released the full, compressed force of her fourth-year core down her right arm.

The air between us didn’t just get cold; a thin crust of white hoarfrost formed across the front of my wool tunic and over my eyelashes in half a second. She faked a high thrust at my throat—forcing me to raise my heavy, numbed arms to cover my chin—then pivoted her left foot behind her right and drove the blunt iron point of her estoc past my left hip, not at me, but straight at Kaelen’s exposed back four feet behind me while he was still finishing his third chalk mark on Mara.

My arms were too heavy with frost to swing my bastard sword back down in time to knock her blade aside.

And I couldn’t use the low-voltage nerve spark I had used on Mercer—Seraphina’s hilt was wrapped in thick silver wire lined with quilted silk, and my fingers were so numb I could barely feel the leather of my own grip.

So I didn’t use my sword.

As the forty-inch steel spike of Seraphina’s estoc shot past my left hip toward Kaelen’s back, I dropped my right hand off my sword hilt entirely, reached down with my newly gloved right hand—the one with Master Bram’s overlapping dark steel plates sewn inside the palm—and grabbed the bare, freezing square steel of Seraphina’s blade six inches in front of her crossguard.

The force of her fourth-year thrust tore through my grip for four inches before the iron plates in my palm bit down on the corners of the square steel shaft.

Even through the steel palm-plates and the linen bandages underneath, the freezing pressure of her Ember bit into my healed acid burn like a pair of iron tongs, while the raw kinetic shove behind her arm twisted my right wrist hard enough to make the tendons pop.

I locked my knees in the frosted clay, leaned my whole torso sideways over my left hip, and squeezed that square steel bar with every ounce of strength the 7th Legion had built into my forearm.

The blunt tip of Seraphina’s estoc stopped dead in the air two inches behind Kaelen’s black shoulder blade.

For half a second, Seraphina’s eyes widened slightly as her blade refused to move forward or backward out of my fist.

At that exact instant, the west wall judge threw his red flag into the air for Mara.

"Three marks on Galt!" the warden’s voice roared from the wall, followed immediately by three loud blasts on his silver whistle. "Two eliminations—Vane and Galt! Match concluded! First-Year Squad Seven advances to the Winter Trials Final!"

For two seconds after the whistle blew, neither Seraphina nor I moved.

My right glove was frozen solid to the steel of her estoc by a rime of white frost that had formed over my knuckles, and my chest was heaving so hard that every breath felt like a stitch in my side. Four feet behind me, Kaelen slowly turned his head, looked at the blunt iron tip hovering two inches from his spine, and let out a quiet breath through his nose.

Seraphina looked down at my right gauntlet locked around the middle of her blade, then up into my face. There wasn’t a drop of sweat on her pale forehead, though her chest was rising and falling faster than usual under her padded vest.

Slowly, she pulled the freezing pressure of her Ember back into her wrist. The white rime on her blade melted into cold water, letting me pry my stiff, aching fingers off her steel.

"You grabbed a thrusting estoc by the fuller," Seraphina said quietly over the deafening roar coming down from the stone bleachers around us. "If this had been tomorrow’s final with live steel, Lieutenant, you would have lost three fingers."

"If it were live steel, I would’ve had my own sword instead of this four-pound iron bar," I said, flexing my right hand slowly to get the blood moving back into my numb knuckles, "and I would’ve chopped your blade in half before it got past my hip."

Seraphina stared at me for a second, then slid her estoc back into its scabbard with a crisp click and reached into her coat pocket to pull out her wire-rimmed spectacles, settling them back onto her nose.

"Good match, Elvit," she said calmly, glancing over at Nia and Luckas, who were climbing out of Mercer’s clay trench with red dust smeared all over their knees. "Go put your hand in warm salt water before the skin blisters from the frost-burn. You’re going to need all five fingers tomorrow morning against Aurio."

Across the pit, Titus Mercer was leaning on his pigskin-wrapped halberd, staring down at the three red chalk stripes across Hektor’s chest with a look of profound disgust on his broad face.

"You ducked into my own ditch, Vance," Mercer rumbled as Luckas walked past him to pick up Nia’s dropped buckler.

"It was a very nice ditch, Mercer," Luckas said cheerfully, though he was leaning slightly on his longsword to hide how hard his knees were shaking after dumping that much fire at once. "Kept the wind off our heads."

That evening, the infirmary on the second floor of the administrative wing smelled strongly of boiled willow bark and camphor oil.

I sat on a wooden stool near the iron stove with my bare right hand submerged up to the wrist in a porcelain basin of hot brine while Madam Sorrel—the elderly head healer who had treated my acid burn the night of the festival—poked at my knuckles with a wooden tongue depressor.

"The skin didn’t split, thank the Ancestors," Madam Sorrel muttered, peering through her spectacles at the pink scar across my palm, which had turned a dull, angry bluish-red around the edges from catching Seraphina’s frosted steel. "Though you bruised the tendon sheath across your middle knuckle. If you swing a four-pound sword tomorrow morning without taping that wrist, your fingers are going to lock up after three parries."

"Tape it tight, then, ma’am," I said. "We go on at ten."

While Madam Sorrel wrapped my wrist and palm in fresh strips of stiff, resin-soaked linen that dried like a thin splint while leaving my fingers free to curl around a sword grip, the infirmary door opened and Kaelen walked in, carrying my dark grey cloak over his arm.

His left forearm was wrapped from wrist to elbow in a cold herbal poultice where Mara Galt’s iron chain had bruised the bone right through his sleeve when he caught it on his blade.

"Nia and Luckas are already back at the dorms," Kaelen said, sitting down on the edge of the empty cot beside my stool. "Bram finished inspecting our live blades for tomorrow. Since it’s the final championship match, the War Ministry signed off on full kit—your runic bastard sword, Luckas’s silver blade, and live points on our shortswords and spears."

"Who’s on Aurio’s line besides him?" I asked, flexing my taped fingers as Madam Sorrel tied off the linen knot and walked away to check on a third-year with a sprained ankle down the hall.

"Corbin Vane—Julian’s cousin—on the long-spear, Rank Six," Kaelen recited quietly. "Valen Dross on the heavy broadsword and kite shield, Rank Eight. And Cassia Thorne on the twin curved sabers, Rank Nine."

I did the numbers in my head without needing a piece of paper.

Rank One, Rank Six, Rank Eight, and Rank Nine.

"Their combined squad average is six," I said. "All four of them are in the Top Ten."

"Every single one," Kaelen agreed, handing me my cloak. "And none of them used more than half their reserves in their semifinal this morning. When we step into Pit One tomorrow, there won’t be a weak link on their line to target. Even if we chalk out Thorne or Dross early, Aurio is six weeks away from his Bud Burst. He’s faster than Vorne and hits harder than Mercer."

I stood up from the stool, slid my taped right hand through the sleeve of my wool cloak, and looked out the tall infirmary window toward the courtyard below.

The snow had started falling again—small, hard flakes blowing sideways past the yellow glow of the oil lanterns. Across the quadrangle, the lights on the top floor of the Student Union were still burning inside the Apex Hall.

"Aurio has one problem tomorrow that none of the other squads had," I said, fastening the silver Rank Three clasp at my throat.

Kaelen raised an eyebrow slightly. "What’s that?"

"He’s the Student Representative, and the whole War Ministry is sitting in the north box watching him fight four first-years with live steel," I said, picking up my cap from the cot. "We can afford to fight ugly, dive in the mud, and take a shallow cut on the shoulder if it lets us knock two of his people onto their backs. Aurio has to win without accidentally killing the Duke of Vance’s heir or Commander Erula’s recruit in front of sixty lords. If he pulls his swings by even an inch to keep from taking Luckas’s head off, we’ve got him."

Kaelen looked at me for a long moment, then stood up from the cot, a tiny, ghost-thin smile touching the corner of his mouth.

"Fighting ugly," Kaelen said. "I think we can manage that. Come on—Nia said if we aren’t back in the common room by eight, Luckas is going to eat all the toasted cheese."