Chapter 50
ONCE, IN THE HUMAN WORLD, she had attended an outdoor play.
It had left her trembling and soaked in cold sweat.
Not because the play had been upsetting, she barely remembered what it had been about now.
Rather, her panic had been caused by the open air playhouse itself.
It had reminded her too much of the dueling grounds.
Rows of benches rose above the dusty, hard-packed circle of earth. But instead of overlooking the scenic Canyonlands of southern California like the playhouse, the grounds ended at a precipice that dropped off to certain death.
Magda had never believed she would ever see them again. Even without her fear of heights, as she stepped through the western door with Kaelan behind her, dread twisted like writhing black eels in her bowels.
Guards arrayed around the semicircular wall separating the spectators from the combatants.
The lowest row of seating sat slightly higher than her head.
The wind howled and swirled through the packed crowd, whipping loose carefully managed plaits and kicking dirt in their eyes.
In the highest balcony, the Crown. Above her, the stone, from which the stands were carved, jutted out, blotting out the Spire, revealing only the cloud-matted sky.
By the eastern door, Lavana, knives drawn. Aquamarine eyes flashed as they tracked Magda’s every movement.
Riker hung to the side, down in a small sunken area known as the pit. Four guards stood at each corner of his little box. Only if Lavana reached beyond the guards could he help her.
Magda’s pulse threatened to bolt. It was all she could do to keep it in check.
Before he could be ushered into his own pit, Kaelan took the back of her neck again and turned her towards him, cupping his hands under her jaw.
Her pulse slowed at his touch. The tacky sweat spreading under her armor cooled and dried.
“Thanks—”
He pressed his lips to hers, firmly, quickly.
“You’re a Rae and I’m a Prince,” he said, “but we’re not like the others. The only thing that matters to me now is you. Not the Crown, not the Throne, not the rules.”
His hands fell from her and he stepped back. The guards corralled him down into the pit.
Before she could catch her breath again or think about what he had said, the Crown’s voice echoed over them.
“Present.”
She turned on her heel, unleashed her daggers at her sides, and inclined her head towards the Crown.
And, after a long second, the word came.
“Engage.”
Lavana didn’t wait, she charged and leapt.
Magda spun away before Lavana’s flying kick could connect.
Lavana landed and spun, setting Magda immediately into a defensive posture. A flurry of hand strikes came at her, knives met knives, clinking and scraping.
Lavana was fast—that was her strength.
A barrage rained down on Magda, daggers cutting so quickly through the air as to be nearly invisible.
Already her breath labored, her vision tunneled so there was nothing but the flash of knives and Lavana’s glittering eyes.
Behind her, the press of the wall, Lavana driving her towards it to pin her.
Blocking one strike and then another, her hand came up directly before Lavana’s face, and she retracted her blades.
Lavana’s brow plunged—a moment of confusion.
Magda threw an elbow across her face, knocking her aside. She dodged back to the middle of the field.
The dueling grounds seemed to shrink and expand from second to second. So that Kaelan appeared a lifetime away, but the precipice only steps, when she knew that in fact he was closer.
Lavana gave her no respite, no chance to think or plan.
She attacked and Magda defended, until Magda was at the edge, heels pushing dust down into the mist.
This was one of the reasons she’d lost to Alanna all those years ago . . . avoiding the ledge at all costs had forced her again and again to sacrifice advantage.
But she wasn’t afraid now, not of heights anyway.
She spun from Lavana’s swiping attack and backed into the center of the field again.
All she needed was one good strike. The ironwood wasn’t very long and wouldn’t penetrate Lavana’s armor. Magda needed to get in close and fast.
Lavana was the only one attacking. And so it was inevitable one of her blows caught Magda eventually, slicing across her hip, below her breastplate and above the scale shielding her thigh.
A searing pain shot into her chest and down to her toes, pumping even more adrenaline into her bloodstream. The wet burn of blood ran down her leg, soaking into her clothes.
Her teeth gnashed, but she refused to cry out.
The crowd’s voices grew distant. Was Kaelan calling her name? Through the blur of battle, the drum of her heartbeat, she couldn’t be certain.
She staggered.
Lavana slowed to smile at her impending victory—just long enough.
That single moment, pain-filled as it was, was the second she needed.
She dodged Lavana’s next strike, raking her knives as she feinted, tearing through the buckles fastening Lavana’s breastplate and through her clothes, to the tender flesh beneath.
Time slowed, Magda could make out each drop of blood that flew from Lavana’s body into the air.
Lavana stumbled, clutching at her wounded side.
Then Magda spun and attacked.
But Lavana had recovered from the shock of injury and held her at bay, not allowing her to get in close enough to use the ironwood.
Still, Magda drove her back—downward slice, upward cut, sweep the ankle.
Lavana blocked and blocked and spun away, right into the wall.
Magda unleashed another spate of strikes, keeping her pinned, seeking an opening.
But Lavana wasn’t to be overwhelmed. In spite of the sweat rolling in crystalline beads down her forehead, off her thick eyelashes, around those eyes hard as gemstones, her focus remained unwavering.
And then the chance came and Magda rushed into it, slim as it was.
The longer the fight went on the worse her chances. She simply didn’t have the stamina.
Strikes came in fractions of heartbeats, blocks just as fast.
When she saw Lavana’s face would be left open in the next move, she snapped back the blades of her left hand, all but the ironwood, and drove it towards Lavana’s throat.
In that moment, the world melted away, until it was only her arm tracking through the air to Lavana’s pulsing vein.
Sounds went mute. All sense of her own wounds, her own breath, her own pulse, vanished. Time seemed to stop.
And that was when she saw her mistake.
Too late.
The opening had been there, but she wasn’t fast enough to seize it.
Time leapt back up to speed.
Lavana ducked the ironwood, came back up on the outside of Magda’s left arm, spinning.
All five of her daggers drove deep into Magda’s exposed side.
She lurched.
Pain exploded and then ebbed away just as fast, tricking her for half-a-breath.
The fleeting thought skated through her mind—That didn’t just happen.
But it had happened.
Her whole left side went weak. Her leg gave out. Her arm turned limp. She buckled and crashed to her knees.
Pain like oil lit aflame rolled through her, sucking the oxygen from her lungs.
Every desperate beat of her heart, grasping to hold on, only seemed to push her further away.
Away from the field and the Spire and the world all around.
Away from her breath and her body and her life.
Lavana gripped her hair and yanked her head back.
She had drawn her daggers back into their sheaths. Blood dripped over the metal—Magda’s blood.
In Lavana’s hand, Magda’s three-sided ghast blade. It flashed with some reflected light, a torch maybe, lightning perhaps.
A second, two, had passed since Lavana’s daggers had sunk deep into her flesh.
Time warped, speeding and slowing at once.
Sweat or tears or rain traced the vicious sharp planes of Lavana’s face that were filling her vision.
Without a word, Lavana brought the ghast blade down towards her throat.
A single brilliant burst of pain, so intense it spun a delicate spider-silk bridge across that chasm between agony and revelation—the physical left stranded while the light of consciousness rushed onward, breathless, freed, towards the High Road and the Godlands.
And so it ended.
She died.
Or so it seemed.
For somewhere along that rushing road, she heard a voice say,
“Oh, that’s no fun.”
She fell and crashed into a mad cacophony, a clash of blurred images, discordant senseless screams, a firestorm of pain.
“Stop—!”
“Seize—!”
Kaelan’s voice. “Stay with me.”
Darkness swept around her, and with it, relief.
The fight, the quest, was over.
She had failed, she had lost, but at least, she was done.
She fell into the sweet silence of the shadows.