Chapter 75

Chapter 75: Chapter 75

Madam Sorrel’s pine-resin tape kept my right wrist straight, though it smelled like turpentine and pinched the skin at the base of my thumb every time I closed my fist around my sword grip.

At nine-forty on Saturday morning, the four of us sat on the wooden benches inside the western tunnel of Pit One while Master Bram walked down our line with a dry rag and an iron measuring gauge, checking our live steel for the last time.

Nobody was talking much. Even Luckas wasn’t making jokes about the kitchen cook today. He sat with his elbows on his knees, turning the silver pommel of his family longsword slowly between his palms while staring at the yellow lamplight reflecting off the bare, sharpened edge of the steel.

Fighting with four-pound blunt bars and red grease-chalk was one thing; if you missed a parry on Thursday, you got a black bruise on your ribs and a lecture from Toris. Out there this morning, if you missed a parry against Cassia Thorne’s twin sabers or Corbin Vane’s seven-foot ash spear, the healers on the north wall would be sewing your muscle back together with catgut thread.

"Take the sheepskin pad off your left shoulder, Valerius," Master Bram told Nia, tapping her leather vest with his iron gauge. "You aren’t fighting club-swingers today. Corbin Vane uses a leaf-bladed boar spear with an eight-inch steel point. Thick fleece just catches the edge and guides the point inward toward your neck. Put the flat iron pauldrons on over your linen wrap so the tip skates off."

Nia nodded without a word, unbuckling the heavy sheepskin pad with stiff movements—her bruised left ribs still made her hitch her shoulder whenever she reached across her chest—and let me help her strap the cold, curved plates of blackened iron over her collar.

"How’s the arm?" I asked Kaelen quietly as I pulled the buckle tight on Nia’s back.

Kaelen flexed his left hand. Under his black sleeve, the bruise from Mara Galt’s iron chain was still swollen hard along the ulna, wrapped tight in vinegar-soaked linen. "Good enough to hold a guard. I won’t try catching any heavy overhead cuts on the flat, though."

"Don’t," I said, sitting down beside Luckas and drawing my runic bastard sword six inches out of its leather scabbard to check the steel. The dark metal was clean, greased lightly with mutton tallow so it wouldn’t stick in the cold sheath. "Leave the heavy blocks to Luckas and me. When the flag goes down, Aurio and Valen Dross will take the center to push us back, while Corbin Vane and Cassia Thorne work the wings."

"Same rule as yesterday?" Luckas asked, looking up from his blade. "Two eliminations?"

"Two eliminations," I confirmed. "With live steel, the wardens call a man out if he drops his main weapon, takes a cut deep enough to bleed through his tunic, or gets pinned with a live point inside two inches of his throat or eye. Aurio knows Nia’s left side is stiff from Thursday, and he knows Kaelen took a chain on the arm yesterday. He’s going to try to end this in under a minute so nobody gets hurt badly in front of the Ministry."

"Considerate of him," Kaelen said dryly, checking the point of Master Bram’s grey dwarven dagger in my thigh sheath before tapping his own belt knives.

"It’s his job," I said. "And it’s the only opening we’re going to get. Luckas, when Aurio steps up to me in the middle, he’s going to bring Valen Dross on his right hip with that big kite shield to keep you from flanking him. Don’t waste your breath trying to melt Dross’s shield."

Luckas frowned. "If I don’t push Dross back, he’ll just walk right over Nia on the wing while Corbin pokes at her from eight feet away."

"Let Nia and Kaelen handle Corbin for ten seconds," I said. "The second Aurio and I lock blades, I want you to drop your shoulder into Dross’s shield rim and shove him sideways into Aurio’s right leg. Make it a dogpile. Aurio fights like a court duelist—long steps, clean lines, plenty of room to swing from the shoulder. If we turn the center of the sand into a bar brawl where nobody can swing a three-foot blade without hitting their own partner, his reach means nothing."

"A bar brawl with the Duke of Gentrimio’s heir," Luckas muttered, a slow, crooked smile finally breaking through the tension around his mouth as he stood up and slid his silver longsword into its scabbard. "My father is going to lock me in the summer tower until I’m thirty. Let’s go do it."

Outside, the snow had stopped at dawn, leaving the sky above the island a hard, bright glare of white clouds that made the yellow clay of Pit One look pale and dead.

The stone amphitheater didn’t sound like a school match today; it sounded like the garrison yard at Shepfold before a pay-day fight. All nine hundred and ninety-two other cadets were packed onto the stone benches, bundled up in grey wool cloaks with mugs of hot broth between their mittens.

Up in the north gallery, the green curtains were tied all the way back. Duke Ramiro sat in his wolfskins beside three Imperial generals in gold-braided collars, while Lord Lorenzo and Captain Varga stood on opposite ends of the front rail with their notebooks open. Next to the Student Council box, Seraphina Vorne stood leaning on the parapet with her arms crossed, watching the sand through her wire-rimmed spectacles alongside Julian Falk and Titus Mercer.

Across the circle, Squad One stood waiting on the eastern chalk mark.

Aurio Gentrimio wasn’t wearing his long crimson representative coat—it would have tangled around his knees in a close fight—though he wore the red-and-gold silk sash of Rank One tied tight around the waist of a tailored black leather brigandine studded with silver rivets. In his right hand, resting point-down on the toe of his boot, was a forty-two-inch hand-and-a-half longsword forged from pale, rippled southern steel that caught the dull winter light like polished bone.

To his right stood Valen Dross, a thick-necked fourth-year behind a curved steel kite shield painted with the grey tower of his house; to his left stood Corbin Vane, holding a seven-foot ash spear with a foot of bright, razor-sharp steel at the tip; and on the far wing stood Cassia Thorne, rolling two curved cavalry sabers in her leather-gloved wrists.

When the four of us walked out of the western gate and lined up on our chalk stripe thirty feet away, the noise in the bleachers died down almost immediately.

Aurio raised his longsword an inch off his boot, offering us a clean, formal salute with the hilt to his chin.

"A good winter to you, Squad Seven," Aurio called across the frozen clay, his voice calm and resonant without needing to shout. "Yield quickly if your guard breaks. The border needs every sword we have in the spring."

"You too, Representative," I called back, drawing my bastard sword from over my shoulder with a low, metallic scrape and holding it in a two-handed low guard across my thighs.

The arena warden—wearing a full steel breastplate and an open-faced iron helm today in case he had to jump between live blades—walked to the wall with three healers standing right behind his shoulder by the stretcher gate.

"Championship Final! First-Year Squad Seven versus Fourth-Year Squad One!" the warden bellowed through his brass horn. "Live steel! Two eliminations by yield, disarm, blood-stop, or pin decide the First-Tier Warrant! Fight!"

The red flag snapped down.

Aurio didn’t wait for us to come to him the way Julian and Seraphina had.

The instant the linen flag touched the warden’s knee, Aurio’s internal Ember flared inside his chest.

Even from thirty feet away across the freezing sand, I felt the heat of it wash against my face—not the smoky, roaring wood-fire heat of Luckas’s core, and not the sharp blue static of my sword runes, rather a heavy, blinding golden warmth like looking straight into a brass mirror at noon in July.

The air around Aurio’s shoulders turned bright gold, melting the frost off the yellow clay in a fifteen-foot circle around his boots as he and Valen Dross came straight across the middle of the pit at a fast, synchronized trot.

I made the mistake of letting a thread of heat touch the Rune of Antiquity on my right forearm as I stepped forward to meet him.

The moment the cold starlight bled into my right eye to map his sword line, Aurio’s golden radiance hit my astral sight like a lantern shoved an inch from my pupil. A sharp, white-hot spike of pain lanced straight behind my right eyebrow, blinding my right eye in a glare of white fog and making my stomach lurch.

I slammed the mental door shut on the rune immediately, blinking hard through watering eyes as I relied purely on my normal vision.

Too bright, I noted grimly, shifting my back boot in the clay as Aurio closed the last ten feet in two long, effortless strides. No rune against him.

Aurio swung his pale southern longsword in a high, whistling diagonal cut aimed at my left collarbone.

He wasn’t swinging wild; his form was textbook perfect, his wrists aligned, his back foot anchored so he could pull the blade back half an inch if my guard broke rather than taking my arm off at the socket.

Even with him holding five percent of his weight back for safety, the sheer speed and mass of a peak Swelled Bud fourth-year hit my upraised bastard sword like a falling church bell.

CLANG.

Orange and blue sparks sprayed three feet into the cold air as our edges met. The shock ran straight past my crossguard into my resin-taped right wrist, making the bruised tendon across my middle knuckle pop sharply and sending my boots skidding six inches back through the frozen dirt.

Before I could push the blue static through my runes to shock his blade, Valen Dross arrived half a step behind Aurio’s right hip, swinging his heavy curved kite shield in to bash my left elbow and open my guard for Aurio’s backswing.

"Down!" Luckas’s voice barked right behind my left ear.

Luckas didn’t swing his silver sword at Dross’s steel shield—that would have just bounced off and left our flank open. Instead, Luckas came in at a dead run behind my shoulder, ignited a blinding jet of orange flame out the back of his left elbow like a blacksmith’s bellows to add fifty pounds of shove to his rush, and threw his entire shoulder straight into the front curve of Dross’s kite shield at a forty-five-degree angle.

The heavy clash of leather and steel sounded like two rams butting heads.

Dross grunted as Luckas’s full weight hit the outer edge of his shield, spinning the big fourth-year half around on his heel and shoving his heavy steel hip squarely into the back of Aurio’s right knee right as Aurio was starting his second cut at my head.

Aurio’s back foot slipped two inches off line as Dross bumped him.

His pale longsword missed my left ear by the width of a thumb—the sharp steel edge slicing cleanly through three strands of my braided white hair and nicking the top rim of my leather shoulder guard instead of cracking my collarbone.

That two-inch stumble was the only chance I was ever going to get against the Rank One in an open circle.