Chapter Twenty Two
“No!” I cry out as Malira tries to kill Alaric. My heart hammers in my chest. Fear fills me.
That is when Alaric falls to both knees, letting her blade pass over his head. Malira's power lets her arrest the swing in mid-movement, but she is too late. Alaric's sword goes over his head to parry the sudden downstroke, while his dagger thrusts upward, into Malira’s heart.
She stands there staring at him, as if she can’t believe what is happening. Her blade clatters from her hands to the stones of the temple structure. Then she topples from it, already dead before she hits the ground.
Alaric lifts his blades, and the crowd erupts. Relief floods through me that he has survived, and I go to shout his name, but I don’t have the strength. Instead, I collapse back onto a couch in Lady Elara’s private box, darkness claiming me.
***
When I wake, it is night and I am in Alaric’s rooms, back in Ironhold, with him looking down at me. For a moment, I can’t remember what I’m doing there. I think that perhaps we have simply spent the night together in the wake of the trials yesterday.
Then memory comes flooding back in. The receiving area, the nobles, the goblet of wine.
“They drugged me,” I say, unable to keep the horror out of my voice. “They poisoned me, and they were going to…”
“You’re safe,” Alaric says. He wraps his arms around me. “Nothing happened to you, Lyra. Did it?”
He must have heard what happened from Lady Elara, but now he wants to hear it from me. I shake my head.
“Nothing happened. Lady Elara intervened before they could get me into one of the rooms. If they’d managed to do that…”
I don’t want to think about the possibility, about what would have happened to me if Lady Elara hadn’t been there to save me from the two nobles. The cruelty in their eyes had been undeniable. They didn’t see me as their equal. They barely saw me as anything human at all. I might have been a victorious gladiator in the games, but to them, I was just a slave for them to toy with as they wished.
No, not as they wished.
“Ravenna did this,” I say. “She set me up. She was the one who had me summoned to the receiving rooms during your bout. She was talking with the men before she left me alone with them. She arranged all of this.”
Alaric’s face contorts with anger. “I wish I could kill her for you.”
I shake my head. I know it isn’t possible. Killing her outside of the arena would mean execution, and for all our powers, the guards and soldiers of Aetheria have more than enough magic of their own to fight us with.
“If I ever face her, I’ll kill her,” I say, and I’m surprised to find that I mean it. I have spent so long trying to be a good person, trying to hold myself above the violence of the games, but I'm done with that, at least when it comes to Ravenna. She has gone too far.
“What I don't get is why she's done this,” Alaric says.
“What do you mean?” I ask. “Do you think she needs an excuse now to humiliate me? I'm sure she's the one who made me fight Rowan, and she has been finding small ways to hurt me ever since I said I wouldn't be her ally.”
Ever since she messed with Naia’s mind and indirectly got her killed.
“It must be more than that,” Alaric says. “Ravenna always has a plan, a scheme of some sort. There must be some bigger picture to this. How do you feel this morning?”
I groan as I try to get out of bed. I currently feel as though I have the worst hangover I've ever experienced. My body feels weak, my head feels woolly, and I can barely concentrate.
“Not great,” I say.
“Maybe that's it,” Alaric says. “Maybe she wants to weaken you for this round. Do you think you will be able to fight properly, Lyra?”
He sounds concerned. Perhaps he knows that I will be made to compete regardless of how I feel. If Ravenna has successfully arranged for me to be poisoned, that won't make a difference. I will still need to fight, and if I'm weak enough, I won't be able to do so effectively.
“I will find a way to do it,” I say. “I won't let her have the satisfaction of seeing me fall. But what about you? You were hurt in your fight against Malira.”
My fingers trace the spots where Alaric was wounded. He hisses in pain, but the wounds are much less severe than they were. My guess is that it's Stefano's work.
“Careful, I didn't have enough time to get everything fully healed. Malira wounded me badly in our fight. You were right about her being dangerous.”
“I saw,” I say. “I made Lady Elara take me to her private box to let me see the fight.”
Alaric holds me closer. “You didn't need to do that. You should have focused on dealing with the drugs in your system.”
"I needed to know if you were alive or dead," I say. "One of the worst things Ravenna did was making me go to the receiving room. Not just because of what almost happened there, but because she deliberately timed it so I wouldn't be able to see your bout. I wouldn't be able to know what was happening. I think she hoped that you would be killed while I wasn't able to watch so it would hit me harder."
“I think you're assuming that everything is part of her cunning plan,” Alaric says.
“Isn’t it?”
"I'm just saying don't overestimate her," Alaric insists. "Ravenna is clever, but she's still limited in what she can do, and I think half the time she takes credit for things because she wants to seem as though she's in control of everything."
Or maybe she really does have the power to control what's happening in the colosseum. She entered the games specifically to gain power and influence. Now, it seems she is wielding it from within.
In some ways she is a mirror to Lady Elara. Both noble women work from the shadows. Both are trying to use influence built up during the games to affect Aetheria. The difference is that Lady Elara seems to be trying to change things for the better, while Ravenna is only interested in herself.
"I hope you're right," I say. I reach for Alaric, but he pulls back from me with a gentle smile.
“It's not that I don't want to,” he says. “But neither one of us is in any shape to do anything. We need our strength, and… do you really want to be with me so soon after you’ve seen me kill?”
It's the first time he's expressed any remorse for killing. I was under the impression that slaying his foes didn't mean much to Alaric. Now, though, he seems to assume that I will think less of him because I saw the moment when he killed Malira.
And maybe being around him has changed me too, because I feel more than ready to kill Ravenna. I have killed people before, in the heat of the combat, but I have never felt the kind of hatred I feel now.
Alaric is right, we both need to save our strength, but even so, I hold to him for long moments. I don’t want to let go of him tonight.
“My mother managed to pick up some of the gossip about the fourth trial,” Alaric whispers to me. It isn’t comforting or romantic, but it is something I need to hear. “She says that it will involve beasts.”
“That makes no sense,” I say. If Ravenna is manipulating the trials, she will want something that might prove a real challenge to me. Even the emperor and Lord Darius have no reason to make things easy for me. “Why would they put a challenge in that I have the ability to deal with?”
“Maybe it’s random,” Alaric says. “Or maybe they feel that they can’t have a set of trials without including beasts.”
“Or maybe there’s some deeper meaning to it all,” I suggest.
“Not everything needs that kind of deeper element,” Alaric says. “The games are dangerous enough without looking for plots around every corner.”
That’s true, but in this case, I’m pretty sure that the plots are there. So why present me with a trial where I’m likely to do well? I’m convinced that there’s some trick to this, some point that I’m not seeing.
But I can’t work it out, and the truth is that I’m tired. Too tired to do anything other than lie there in Alaric’s arms, waiting for sleep to claim me. We both need all the rest we can get, because in the morning, we will face the beasts.