Chapter 78

Chapter 78: Chapter 78

Across the twenty feet of churned mud, Valen Dross slammed his smoking kite shield hard against Luckas’s silver blade, pinning Luckas’s sword arm high against his own chest, while Cassia Thorne lunged low from the left, both curved sabers whistling toward the back of Luckas’s right thigh to draw the match-winning blood.

I had maybe one second before steel hit Luckas’s leg.

Aurio stood directly between me and them, his longsword held in a flawless high guard, the golden heat-shimmer around his blade waiting to slice my arm open the instant I tried to run past him.

I couldn’t out-fence him. My taped right wrist was already throbbing like a bad toothache, and his heat mirage made every clean parry a coin toss.

So I stopped trying to parry him.

I pushed every drop of Ember left in my chest straight down into my legs and charged straight into the middle of Aurio’s golden heat-shimmer—not swinging at his sword, and not trying to dodge his blade.

Aurio’s amber eyes widened slightly as he realized I wasn’t raising my crossguard to block him.

His downward cut was already in motion—forty-two inches of razor-sharp Damascus steel augmented with fourth-year heat, dropping straight toward the side of my neck where my wool collar gapped below my padded cap.

If he let that swing finish at full speed against an unblocking opponent, he wouldn’t draw a neat tournament "first blood" on my shoulder. He’d take my head halfway off my spine in front of the entire War Ministry.

I saw the exact tenth of a second when the Student Representative’s brain overrode the soldier’s instinct.

Aurio’s knuckles tightened on his gold grip. He twisted his wrists violently in mid-air to turn the sharp cutting edge of his longsword sideways into a flat slap so he wouldn’t kill me.

Turning a heavy sword flat in the middle of a full-power swing ruins your wrist alignment for half a heartbeat.

The flat of Aurio’s scorching-hot blade smacked hard against the left side of my leather shoulder guard—knocking a shower of blue sparks off my steel and burning a black stripe across the wool—while I let go of my bastard sword with my left hand, reached straight through the shimmering heat haze, and clamped my left gauntlet squarely over both of Aurio’s wrists on his sword hilt.

"Kaelen—Luckas’s left!" I roared, hanging my entire weight off Aurio’s sword arms so he couldn’t pull his blade back to swing again.

Ten feet behind me, Kaelen didn’t get up off his knees to run across the mud; he wouldn’t have made it to Luckas in time.

Instead, still kneeling in the salted slush where Aurio’s flash had knocked him down, Kaelen whipped both arms forward from his sleeves.

Two live-steel black throwing knives didn’t fly at Cassia Thorne’s back—throwing live steel into a cadet’s spine was an instant disqualification. They flew sixty feet low across the mud and buried themselves half an inch deep in the thick iron-faced wood at the very bottom point of Valen Dross’s kite shield, right as Dross lifted his front foot to take another step into Luckas.

Kaelen hadn’t thrown normal knives. Trailing behind the iron rings of both hilts was a six-foot length of thin, braided steel garrote-wire he had looped through his belt before the match.

Kaelen wrapped the middle of the wire twice around the hilt of his planted shortsword in the dirt and yanked backward with both shoulders.

As Dross tried to shift his shield left to keep Luckas pinned, the bottom tip of his kite shield jerked six inches sideways toward Kaelen, pulling Dross’s shield arm wide open across his chest.

Luckas didn’t miss the hole.

With his sword arm suddenly free of Dross’s shield rim, Luckas didn’t swing at Dross; he spun on his back heel inside Dross’s open guard, dropped to one knee in the slush right in front of Cassia Thorne’s incoming sabers, and thrust his roaring, orange-hot silver longsword straight through the three-inch gap between the two brass basket-hilts of Thorne’s crossed blades, twisting his crossguard upward with both hands.

Metal screeched as Luckas’s heavy silver crossguard levered against her thumb-rings. Before Thorne could pull her hands back, the raw heat radiating two inches off Luckas’s blade blistered the leather of her right glove. She gasped, her fingers opening instinctively to save her hand from the burn, and her right saber went spinning five feet into the air to land point-first in the salted clay outside the chalk line.

"Disarm on right blade!" the east warden shouted, raising his flag halfway—though a dual-wielder wasn’t eliminated until both weapons were down or blood was drawn.

Thorne tried to jump back on one foot with her remaining left saber raised to guard her chest.

She never got her back heel down.

While I had both of Aurio’s wrists locked down against my left hip with my left gauntlet—ignoring the way his golden heat was charring the leather of my glove and scorching the skin of my forearm—I didn’t try to stab Aurio with my right hand. Aurio was already twisting his hips to throw me over his thigh, and with my stiff, resin-taped right wrist, I couldn’t get my long bastard sword turned around inside a one-foot clinch before he broke my grip.

So I didn’t fight Aurio.

I kicked my right heel backward into the slush against the side of Aurio’s front knee to pivot us both ninety degrees around in the mud, let go of my bastard sword completely so it dropped into the dirt between our boots, and drew Master Bram’s nine-inch grey dwarven dagger from my right thigh sheath.

I didn’t point it at Aurio.

As Cassia Thorne hopped backward away from Luckas’s hot blade, her back bumped squarely into the blind spot right behind Aurio’s left shoulder.

Still holding Aurio’s sword hands pinned against my ribs with my smoking left glove, I reached straight past Aurio’s left ear with my right hand, hooked two fingers inside the back collar of Cassia Thorne’s padded gambeson to pull her backward off her heels onto the hip of my outstretched leg, and pressed the flat, cold grey steel of Bram’s dwarven dagger firmly against the bare skin under her chin while Luckas’s silver longsword came down from the front to tap the steel cap of her left shoulder.

"Halt! Pin and point on Thorne!" all four corner wardens roared at once, four white staves slamming down into the salted clay as the bronze gong by the judges’ table rang out across the amphitheater like a thunderclap. "Two eliminations—Vane and Thorne! Match and Championship to First-Year Squad Seven!"

For three full seconds, the twelve stone tiers of Pit One were completely silent.

Down in the center of the churned, grey slush pile, nobody moved.

My left leather gauntlet was smoking heavily where I still had it clamped over Aurio’s hot wrists, smelling of burned horsehide and singed hair. My bastard sword was lying flat in the mud under Valen Dross’s boot. Cassia Thorne was sitting sideways across my right knee with my dwarven dagger under her chin and Luckas’s steaming silver point resting an inch from her collarbone, while Kaelen was still on one knee twenty feet away with his steel wire wrapped around his sword hilt like a fisherman hauling in a sturgeon.

Slowly, the golden heat shimmering around Aurio’s shoulders faded back into the pale winter morning air.

Aurio looked down at my burned left glove wrapped around his wrists, then at his own longsword—which was still turned flat against my scorched shoulder pad where he had pulled his lethal edge at the last tenth of a second—and finally sideways at Cassia Thorne pinned across my knee.

Then Aurio Gentrimio let his head fall back and laughed.

It wasn’t his polite, quiet Student Council chuckle. It was a loud, breathless, completely genuine laugh that echoed across the silent sand circle as he opened his hands and let his pale Damascus longsword drop into the slush beside mine.

"You knew I’d turn the edge flat," Aurio said, shaking his head as I released his wrists and pulled my dagger back from Thorne’s chin. "You left your whole neck open on purpose because you knew I wouldn’t decapitate a first-year in front of the War Ministry."

"You’re a very responsible representative, Aurio," I said, blowing on the burned knuckles of my left glove before reaching down to help Cassia Thorne up out of the mud. "I figured there was at least an eighty-percent chance you wouldn’t kill me."

"Eighty percent," Luckas wheezed from his knees in the slush, leaning both hands on the hilt of his cooling silver sword as his chest heaved like a blacksmith’s bellows. "Next time tell me when the odds are below ninety, Lieutenant, before I roast my own lungs."

Up in the bleachers, the silence broke all at once.

The entire southern half of the amphitheater—every first-year and second-year cadet in the citadel—stood up on the stone benches and roared loud enough to shake loose snow off the awning roofs, banging sword scabbards, boots, and tin cider mugs against the rails until the noise drowned out the ten-o’clock bells.

Up in the crimson War Ministry box, the elderly Imperial general sitting beside Lord Lorenzo slapped his gloved palm down on the stone parapet with a broad, grim smile, while ten feet to his right, Captain Varga of Sospurro stood frozen by Duke Ramiro’s chair, his face the color of wet chalk as he stared down at the four first-years standing in the middle of the ring.

Nia came hobbling back out onto the edge of the sand from the healers’ bench, her right shoulder wrapped in a thick white linen pad pinned over her tunic, waving her good left arm wildly as Kaelen coiled his steel wire back around his hand and walked over to join us.

"We did it!" Nia shouted over the roar of the crowd, throwing her good left arm around Luckas’s neck as he stood up, nearly knocking him back into the slush before grabbing my unburned right sleeve. "Number one on the board! Nobody gets to split us up in the spring!"

Aurio picked his pale longsword up out of the salt, wiped the mud off the flat of the blade with a silk handkerchief from his pocket, and picked up my heavy runic bastard sword by the middle of the fuller, holding it out to me hilt-first.

"Congratulations, Captain Elvit," Aurio said, his amber eyes bright and sharp as he inclined his head—not the slight nod a fourth-year gives a junior, but the dead-level bow one field commander gives another. "The independent scouting warrant is yours. Though if you ever pull that suicide neck-bait in a real skirmish across the river, Commander Erula will skin you alive before the Viganator gunners get the chance."

"Across the river, I wouldn’t have dropped my sword," I said, taking my hilt back with my taped right hand and sliding the dark steel home into the scabbard across my back.