30. Finally, the day of reckoning #2
I ran my hands over the scree-covered, frigid ground, coating them with fine powder for grip, before I notched my toes into my first foothold and launched myself up.
The rock, of course, was brutally brittle. Why wouldn’t it be, with my astounding luck? Each time I scaled a little farther, pieces crumbled against my fingers, sending shrapnel raining down my body and into the clearing below.
My heart thundered in displeasure at not knowing how much of the stone would give way with each push and grasp, but I maneuvered my body from one workable divot to the next with relative efficiency.
Until halfway up.
I sank my fingers into another unassuming divot, pushing up, and the entire fucking ledge supporting me snapped.
My stomach surged up my throat with an acrid burn, and I let out a startled yelp as I lost my grip on my new hold. For a few horrible beats of my heart, I was hanging by one arm and strained shoulder, pressed against the cliff face by a brutal gust of wind.
My boot scraped desperately for purchase, once, twice—
I found a foothold and let out a shaky breath.
Before the terrain could change its mind, I launched myself upward.
The shift in difficulty from then on was stark.
I had to reach a little farther for every ledge. Grip smaller spans of rock with my numbing fingers. Work my toes into tinier crevices and push a little harder. Nothing I couldn’t handle—
until I ran out of places to grip.
“For fuck’s sake,” I muttered as I scanned the last span of rock separating me from the cliff’s edge and that damned, taunting lantern.
Save for a few paper-thin creases in the stone, the rest of the span of the face was smooth as glass.
The top edge was so fucking close, but there was no way I could reach it even if I propelled myself up with all the might in my legs—never mind how little I trusted the integrity of the stone now. And that meant I was going to have to maim a perfectly good blade.
How disappointing.
I slipped it free from the sheath on my thigh and struck the only thin crease within reach. It took a few tries for the rock to crumble away and get the blade wedged securely, but I was using it to haul myself up those last feet before I knew it.
I rolled over the top edge of the cliff in an inelegant movement and reached back over to wrench the poor blade free. It found its home secured back on my thigh before I pushed myself up, dusted a fine coating of stone dust off my body, and wiped at my watery eyes.
My body was built for this environment, I reminded myself, though it didn’t feel like it at all.
I glanced down at the first nytefire lantern and kicked it straight over the edge of the cliff. It shattered on the scree slope below and sent a pillar of radiant blue nytefire streaking skyward. The stadium was still silent or dampened, but I forced myself to smile.
“One down,” I huffed. “Two to go.”
The back side of the cliff descended in a steep, crude path, flanked by towering black pine trees, and it fought me with every fucking step. Loose rocks shifted and slid away constantly under my feet, sending me stumbling and sliding the entire way.
Despite keeping my stance low, my arms splayed, and my core engaged for balance, I ended up flat on my ass at the bottom.
The bruised ass cheek, I could handle; the fresh slice on my palm would be a little more of an inconvenience.
But there was no time to dwell. I wiped my bloodied hand on my fitted, uniform-issued pants and hurried the rest of the way down the winding footpath, weaving through trees and jutting rock until it all fell away to a wide open vista.
The cragged gorge I’d first glimpsed from the platform sprawled out in front of me, and the only way across it was a rope bridge stretched over the gap without an ounce of protection from the howling wind. Easily half of its narrow planks were missing.
Fuck. Me.
As if the arena heard my thoughts, the bridge rattled a little harder, and one plank fell into the depths below.
I never heard it land, but I took my first cautious step anyway.
A gust ripped through the gorge, and the entire structure swung like a pendulum of imminent death.
Foolishly, I glanced down at the thousands of feet of air and jagged rock below. Acid burned my throat.
So much for my lifelong comfort with heights.
“Goddess, take me,” I whimpered. “Take me quickly if you must.”
I gripped the rope rails with all my might, keeping my footsteps soft as I moved from plank to plank. Each got a testing press before I shifted onto it and focused on spreading my weight evenly across the brittle wood.
Light step. Settle weight. Testing press.
Light step. Settle weight. Testing press.
Over and fucking over.
I lost count after the hundredth plank, minus a few that met their end somewhere in the gorge and took pieces of my frenzied heart with them.
But I was almost there—another few dozen steps, tops.
If only the wind would yield for a fucking second.
My vision was nothing but a blurry wash, and my face had gone so far past chilled numbness, it circled back to burning.
When I finally made it to solid ground, getting my first reprieve from that brutal wind, I sank to my hands and knees.
My lungs raged as if I’d breathed in nothing but fire, and no amount of gulping down air would do anything to ease the feeling.
So, with an abundance of logic, I forced myself up and kept moving.
A short set of crude stone steps led me up to a landscape so jarring, it took a second to process the sudden break in the endless sea of stone and pine.
An alpine meadow so lush, I wanted to climb into its gently rippling grasses. Pluck a few of its snow-white blooms. Knock over and re-stack a few of the small cairns dotting the landscape.
There were dozens of piles of stacked stones, after all.
Figuring out that the lantern would be entombed in one of them did not take long, and the realization whisked away my slight relief on the next breeze.
The even scatter of the cairns did not seem to have any rhyme or reason, so I started with the closest and said a quiet prayer as the jagged bits of shale sliced away at my frozen fingers.
Nothing in the first one. Or the second. Or the third.
Nor the fourth, fifth, or sixth. By the tenth, blood slicked my hands.
By the fifteenth, frustration brought a new burn to the corners of my aching eyes. By the twentieth, my fleeting hold on my composure slipped.
“Please,” I whispered as I planted my palms in the grass and hung my head, resigned to talking to a fucking arena. “You’re…alive, right? So you can hear me?”
I could’ve sworn the ground rumbled back at me.
“Was that a yes?” I’d well and truly lost my mind. “Please, just give me a hint. A direction? Anything?”
Something thudded to my left, and my eyes snapped over.
The cairn just two over shuddered, and a stone rolled free from it.
No. Fucking. Way.
Had the arena just listened?
I scrambled over and ripped the stones apart just enough to expose the top of the glass lantern and nearly sobbed with relief. The closest chunk of shale served as my hammer, shattering the dome and sending another streak of nytefire into the sky.
One to go.
Still, the crowd was silent, and I was too fucking tired to care if it was magic dampening them, or if they were just that apathetic to my success.
I wiped my face on my sleeve and continued across the meadow.
Towards the furthest end, the pine trees that bordered the grass sprawled inward and grew denser.
An easy slope led me into them and their gently rustling boughs and rich scent.
The more I walked through the unassuming quiet, the more tension crept up my spine.
I half expected a sick shifter to launch out from behind a tree at any moment and maul me to pieces.
But the attack never came.
I descended farther down a winding but delicately sloped path flanked by steep embankments and dense trees, working on catching my breath in the pine-rich air.
Since my first two legs had been manageable, if only a little frustration-inducing, I knew with certainty that my last stage was going to be awful. Eilir had told me this entire gauntlet would be unassuming but demanding, and I could feel that culmination coming deep in my bones.
This was, after all, a tournament meant to separate the boys from the men, so to speak, and it would be foolish to think that principle wouldn’t apply to the very first event.
Confirmation came when the tranquil pathway I traveled opened into a deep basin and an immaculate glacial pool of the most incredible aquamarine blue.
All that lay across it was the platform that would lead me out of the arena—the illustrious finish line.