Chapter 180: An ordinary player?

"She does not exist on any machine that I can reach."

The woman glanced at him with mild interest, as one might glance at a clever child.

"Lysandra," Bram said, without taking his eyes off the stranger. "Her mind."

"I tried." Lysandra Thorne was holding her own face in both hands. "The moment she appeared, I tried. There is nothing there, Bram. Where her mind should be, there is only light."

The woman smiled.

It was a lovely smile, small and warm and entirely unbothered. Then she turned her amber eyes back to the boy, and she brought her hands together in front of her, as if to applaud.

"I must say, I am impressed," she said. "I have stood here since the S-ranks first gathered. I stood through the vote, and the shouting, and a very loud disagreement about a table. No one noticed me. Not once." Her eyes sparkled.

"And then you walk in, and within the hour, you look straight at me and ask me to come out."

"I felt you when I came through the doors," Leon said.

"Did you?"

"Yes."

"Then why did you wait until now to say so?"

"I wanted to be sure."

’Leon,’ said Medusa.

’I know.’

’She is not like the others. She is not like the old man or the swordsman.’

’I know.’

’It reminds me of someone.’

He slid down from the half of the broken table where he had been sitting and rose to his feet.

The golden light from the woman fell across the rubble, and long shadows stretched behind the S-ranks who lay and sat around the floor.

He walked three paces to the middle of the ruined room and stopped there, and he looked up at her with a calm and thoughtful expression.

"There is something that I have been wondering about," he said.

"Oh, I do like a good question." The woman settled onto the air, sitting down on nothing with one leg crossed over the other, as comfortably as if she were on a cushion. "Ask me."

Sorin made a small choking noise.

"She is not folding the space," he whispered. "She is not even touching it. She is sitting on the light itself."

"Your energy is familiar," Leon said.

"Is it?"

"I met someone with the same feeling, not long ago." Leon’s voice was perfectly level.

"It was at the Roaring Lions. A man appeared in the middle of the night, and he was not like any of the players I had ever fought. He had powers that I did not understand, and he tried to pin me down."

The S-ranks stirred.

"He did not stop at pinning," Leon went on. "He took hold of the sky itself, and he tore it open. I saw the stars through the crack."

"Tore the sky?" Maelis said hoarsely. "Nobody can tear the sky. That is not a thing that a player can do."

"Maelis," said Ilsa.

"I am only saying that it is not possible."

"Hush," said Bram. His face had turned very still. He was not looking at Maelis. He was looking at the woman.

"That man is the one she reminds me of," Leon said. "Their energy is not the same, but it is the same kind. It is like two fires burning from one flame."

For a long moment, nothing happened.

The woman looked at him. The soft smile did not leave her face, and her amber eyes did not change. But somewhere in the room, a very faint ringing began, as if a single glass were being tapped by a distant finger.

"Really?" she said.

"Yes."

"How curious." She tapped one pale finger against her cheek. "A man who tore the sky. I am afraid that I know nothing about such a person. It sounds terribly rude."

"You do not know him."

"I do not." The woman spread her hands, and her face was perfectly open. "I am just an ordinary player, little one. A very quiet one. I tend to stay in the corners. I am hardly the sort to be mixed up in sky-tearing."

"An ordinary player?" Maelis Voren repeated hoarsely.

He had gotten to his feet at some point, and he was swaying slightly, with his lank hair plastered to his forehead. His eyes were round.

"That is impossible. There’s nothing ordinary about you."

" I know every S-rank here, and I have never, not once, in all my life..."

"Maelis," said Ilsa.

"...seen her. How could I not have seen her? Look at her! She is glowing!"

"Maelis, hush."

"I am only saying that if I had met a golden lady..."

"An S-rank would be on the board," Seraphine said hoarsely. "Every one of us has a name on the board in the lobby. I have walked past those names ten thousand times. Yours is not among them."

"Perhaps they spelled it wrong," the woman said pleasantly.

"Wait," Haldor said softly.

The swordsman had not moved from where he sat against the pillar. He was looking at the woman with his clear gray eyes, and there was something in his face that none of the others had managed yet.

It was not fear, and it was not surprise. It was the recognition of a man who has looked at a mountain for a very long time and has suddenly realized that it is a very large animal.

"There were ten of us in this room," the Sword Saint said. "I counted when I came in. I have just counted again, and now... she’s here."

"Which means," Bram whispered, "that she is..."

"Oh, you needn’t be so serious about it," the woman said, waving her hand. "I am only a player, as I said. I came to see how the council would go. You are such dear people. It would have been rude to interrupt."

"Who are you?" Bram said.

"Names," said the woman, "are such tedious things."

"I did not ask for your opinion of them."

"No. You did not." She smiled at him, and it was a patient and friendly smile, like the one a grandmother gives a child who has asked the same question three times.

"But I have told you what I am, Bram, dear, and I find that I am rather tired of saying it."

The old man glared at her. He had plainly not been spoken to in that tone for twenty years, and he could not find a single thing to say in reply.

Nobody laughed. Nobody said anything at all.

Leon thought of the other man, the one at the Roaring Lions, with his mixed black and white hair and his pitch-black eyes and the cracked lips that had smiled while the sky came apart.

This woman looked nothing like him, and yet the feeling in the air was the same.

The golden woman turned her head back toward the boy. She uncrossed her legs, and her feet touched the rubble without a sound.

She walked three paces across the broken stone, light and unhurried, and stopped an arm’s length from him.

She was a head shorter than Leon, and she looked up at him with her hands clasped behind her back, like a girl on a school trip.

"Now," she said. "Let us put the pleasantries aside."

"Yes."

She smiled, and her amber eyes were as warm and as bottomless as a well.

"You said that I am like a man who tore the sky. That is a rather large claim, you know."

"And so I would like to ask you one question." Her voice was gentle. "Are you really sure of what you have said, little one?"