Fifteen #2
He was admitted after paying a door-fee that he was certain had been inflated dramatically thanks to his accent and clothes, and stepped through into humidity and noise and, in the centre of it all, the fighting ring.
Estiene had never been to one before, but everyone knew this sort of place existed.
The lower floor of the warehouse had a high ceiling and there were some residual crates stacked in dark corners, but most of the large space was open floor for the crowds who surrounded the raised, circular ring with its wooden railings, where two men stripped to the waist and with coloured wrapping on their knuckles paced in a wary circle.
This particular round was clearly just beginning.
The space was humid and raucously noisy and smelled of bodies and sour wine, all given a bizarrely civilised, celebratory air by the circulating people selling food and drink.
Even here one couldn’t escape the bloody sweetmice during feast week, although the rolls that Estiene waved away were less mice and more blobs, their rock-sugar eyes askew.
They looked wobbly and manic. Estiene sympathised.
He figured he should buy something as camouflage, or at least so he stopped clenching his fists nervously, and was overcharged again for a cup of chilled wine that became rapidly less chilled in his grip. It tasted foul. Well, he could always throw it in someone’s eyes if he was harassed.
But he wasn’t. There were a few second-glances at his robe, but the crowd—despite the noise and alcohol—seemed no more badly behaved than the spectators at a fencing tournament or a tennis match.
They were there to have a good time, be entertained, and to place bets. Money was being exchanged openly.
Many of the crowd were older townies with the cropped, severe hairstyle and solid build of manual workers, though there were plenty with braided hair and some with it daringly loose: young men and women and a handful of genderfree with their band set over hair that fell unbraided to their jaw like Estiene’s.
For the first time it made him feel like he’d done something to fit in, rather than otherwise.
The next time he looked back at the ring, Jehan had appeared.
Jehan’s plain clothes weren’t much different from those worn by the spectators, except that he wore a bright blue band on one upper arm, signalling his role as healer.
He stood on a step just below the level of the ring, watching the fight closely with his head tilted in a listening pose.
The speaker, beside him, was a short, powerful man with the odd combination of cropped hair and a bright journade of goldthread brocade—Mathé, he must have been sweltering—eye-catching in the crowd.
Unease slid through Estiene. He’d heard senior healers like his father talk about these fighting rings and the boxing gyms they were often attached to, and not just out of angry exasperation that the people of Sieuxerr would pulp themselves in such a way and then turn up at the free clinic expecting treatment so they could do it all over again.
There was talk of low-quality healers making money from very disreputable work indeed, turning their gifts toward tweaking bodies to be faster, stronger, in the name of seeking illegal advantage in sports and fights like this one.
The extent of what was possible was still a matter of debate.
It was certainly one of the few crimes that only a healer could commit.
Estiene looked at the huge bulk of one of the fighters: the bulge of melon-sized muscles beneath skin, far more defined and dramatic than the practical largeness of the bouncers outside.
He looked at Jehan, now reaching between the railings to lay a diagnostic hand on this man’s opponent during a pause in the fight.
The single mouthful of wine in Estiene’s stomach had a queasy disagreement with the biscuit from earlier. It was a ridiculous idea. Jehan came up with as many bad ideas as good ones, but even he wouldn’t go that far.
Probably.
The fights continued. Cheers greeted some of the fighters when they were announced, and betting happened at a feverish pace.
Jehan worked steadily: sometimes just nodding at the man in gold and clearing a fighter to continue after diagnostics, sometimes performing healings.
He shoved one burly woman’s nose back into place, blood from her nostrils coating his hands, and Estiene thought of Jehan’s brilliant half-under technique from this morning’s exam with a new, unpleasant shock.
One man’s ear was ripped clean off, and Jehan stepped in to reattach it—not a simple task, that, and certainly not one that should be performed at this kind of slapdash speed—to roars of hungry approval.
What was violence, after all, when it could be reversed so that more violence could be inflicted on the same body?
Rain thrummed faintly overhead. Sweat gathered in the hollow of Estiene’s neck and dampened beneath his arms, and a dull headache settled in to join the unease he couldn’t shake. Every so often he took a nervous sip of his wine and remembered how dreadful it was.
Each round of fighting was short enough to hold attention, and each had a different gimmick of fighting style or even weapons like sticks or short lengths of rope.
It was all so crude, so showy. Academie scholars learned self-defence, in the precise sense of the words.
They did not learn to fight for an audience, or to start anything with the intention of maximising damage.
Jehan was gone.
Fuck. Where was he? Estiene pushed closer to the ring, muttering apologies whenever he trod on a foot or jostled someone’s wine-cup.
The crowd was denser here. He forced himself to a point where there were only two rows of people between himself and the ring, then collided hard enough with a stray elbow that his own wine lurched over the cup’s rim.
Estiene paused to inspect the inevitable stain on a robe that he would, at least, not have to wear again beyond this week. Provided they passed the Grand Exam.
And then Jehan hauled himself back up to the ring, and ducked through the railing.
The blue band was still around his arm. It was the only thing he wore above the waist. His braid was pinned up in a crown and his knuckles were wrapped, also in blue, and it was only at that point that Estiene realised what was about to happen.
Thunder cracked.
Jehan’s frown of concentration melted. He laughed in delight, arms spread as if he were a Palian weather-mage and he’d done it himself. Estiene had forgotten about the rain—or at least stopped hearing it.
Now the storm was here, on top of them. The air in Estiene’s lungs thickened.
This was absurd. This was dangerous. Estiene wanted to surge up there and yell in Jehan’s face and drag him out of the ring by the ankle.
Instead he took a step behind the person beside him—taller and broader than he was, like an annoying majority of his fellow spectators—to hide from view when Jehan made a slow circle, arms still outstretched.
Jehan’s opponent was well-matched, at least, similarly tall and young and also with Jehan’s style of lean muscle, although this man with his short-swinging fair hair was broader in the shoulders. His hands were wrapped in green.
It wasn’t just Estiene’s own dread and excitement. The whole atmosphere had heightened. The press of people behind and beside Estiene was as eager as it had been for some of the showier weapon-fights, or the more gruesome wounds. Jehan was a fixture not only beside this ring but within it.
The first blow of Green’s fist slammed against Jehan’s ribs with a meaty thud. Estiene almost lost his own breath. And then struggled to find it again, as muscle moved beneath Jehan’s skin and Jehan spun on one heel to drive his other leg hard against Green’s knee.
A cry of alarm was trapped halfway up Estiene’s throat. The longer it stayed there, the more he watched, the more it began to fizz and burn like rum thrown back too fast. His abdominal muscles tightened. He couldn’t see anything, hear anything, except what was taking place in the ring.
All the fights were to the surrender, and every loser had limped away conscious, but there had been some dreadful injuries dealt and healed tonight.
And neither Jehan nor his partner were holding back.
Estiene was close enough to hear the harsh pant of breath and the grunts of pain.
Green seemed to have iron bars for limbs; Jehan, one of the best fighters in their cohort—and didn’t that make sense now—was as likely to absorb a hit as to move sinuously out of its way.
It seemed a fight, like a chorale piece, like a healing, could have a harmony and a rhythm to it. Jehan did not fight like a chorale. He fought like percussion. He fought with giddy disregard for his own body.
It would have felt less obscene watching Jehan fuck the man. At least healers were allowed to do that. A healer’s strength was valuable and their body, beyond the small and controlled exercises done for the purpose of learning, inviolate.
A rake of nails and Jehan’s shoulder erupted in red, and Jehan’s mouth opened in a sound that Estiene strained to hear. Fuck. Was the other man wearing metal tips? Had he sharpened his nails? The gouges looked like Jehan had tangled with an enormous cat.
Jehan got some distance, panting, and slapped fingers over his shoulder to check the wound.
He hesitated, a feral flicker on his mouth.
The crowd screamed something too jumbled for Estiene to make out.
Jehan left another artful hesitation—more noise filled it as if poured from a jug—then lifted his bloodied hand away with the gouges unhealed.
Estiene didn’t know what was more horrifying: that Jehan would use his magic to heal himself during something like this, or that he wouldn’t use it.