Chapter 12 #2
"The later bouts are where it matters." Vaike's eyes are on the ring, reading each fight as fluently as he reads a room. "The final rounds draw the elite warriors from each clan. The best fighters, the specialists, the ones who make other warriors nervous."
"And the point of it is?"
"Skill, reputation, trade." Vaike glances at him.
"The tournament is a showcase. Clans watch each other's warriors and assess their strength.
Sometimes it leads to trades, a warrior who impresses another clan's Warlord might be offered a position, a better assignment, a promotion within a different hierarchy. It's how the clans stay competitive."
"They trade warriors the way they trade horses?"
"They trade warriors the way they trade skilled professionals who have agency over their own careers," Vaike corrects, though there is a hint of amusement beneath the correction. "Any warrior who switches clans does so willingly. The tournament simply creates the opportunity."
Evran watches the fight below. The Rendari warrior lands a clean strike to the Ashenmoor fighter's shoulder guard, and the crowd cheers. The Ashenmoor fighter recovers, resets, and comes back with a combination that drives the Rendari warrior back three paces.
"It's too bad we don't have anyone to compete," Evran says.
Vaike's mouth pulls into a smirk, slow and deliberate, and Evran recognizes it immediately as the expression that means he knows something Evran does not and is thoroughly enjoying the advantage.
"You don't think so?" Vaike says.
Evran frowns. "Do we?"
Vaike says nothing. He tilts his head toward the far end of the grounds, where the fighters are staging for the next round, and Evran follows his gaze and sees Naela standing at the edge of the ring, stripped to a fighting tunic, her blonde hair braided tight against her skull and her axes in her hands.
She is rolling her shoulders, loosening up, and even from this distance Evran can see the easy, predatory grace of her movements, a body trained for violence and wearing it as naturally as breathing.
"Naela is fighting?" Evran says.
"Naela signed up for three events," Bran says from his end of the bench, and his voice brims with pride, having personally trained the warrior in question. "Axe, sword, and open melee."
"She's going to win all of them," Leona says, without looking away from the ring, delivering the assessment as fact rather than prediction.
Naela's first bout is in the axe competition. Her opponent is a Rendari warrior, a big man, heavily muscled, with a two-handed axe and the confident swagger of a previous champion. The crowd is enthusiastic, and the Rendari section stamps their feet and chants his name.
The match begins.
It is over in ninety seconds.
Naela is fast, faster than someone her size should be, and her movements have the fluid, inevitable quality of something elemental, something that cannot be blocked because it simply flows around whatever stands in its way.
Her axes are extensions of her arms, spinning and striking and deflecting in patterns that look less fighting and more dancing.
The Rendari warrior comes at her hard, relying on strength and reach, and Naela simply is not where his axe is.
She sidesteps, pivots, deflects the heavy blade with one axe and strikes with the other, and the Rendari warrior staggers sideways and tries to recover and Naela is already there, inside his guard, one axe hooked behind his knee and the other resting lightly against his throat.
The crowd goes silent for one stunned beat, and then it erupts.
Evran is on his feet. He does not remember standing, but he is up, cheering, his hands cupped around his mouth, shouting Naela's name into the noise of the crowd.
Beside him, Bran is pounding the bench with his fist and laughing.
Even Leona's mouth has curved into something that is unmistakably a smile.
Naela steps back from her fallen opponent, lowers her axes, and inclines her head to the crowd. She catches Evran's eye in the stands and winks.
The sword bout is longer but no less decisive.
The open melee, four fighters in the ring simultaneously, is chaos, and Naela navigates it with the patient precision of a woman who has been waiting for exactly this challenge.
She takes out the first opponent in the opening exchange, lets the other two fight each other for a minute, then steps in and finishes them both in a sequence of strikes that draws a collective gasp from the stands.
Several other clan leaders take notice. Evran watches the Ashenmoor Warlord lean toward his advisor and speak in a low voice, eyes on Naela.
The Windfar Warlord is watching too, her sharp face calculating.
Even Harath, who has presumably seen the best warriors in the clans for fifteen years, looks impressed.
Vaike does not seem concerned.
"They can look all they want," he says, when Evran asks if he is worried about Naela being poached. "She's been offered positions in other clans three times. She turned them all down."
"Why?"
"Because the Drakkari treat their warriors well. And because." He pauses, and the smirk returns. "She's terrified of Leona."
"I heard that," Leona says.
"It's a compliment."
Evran grins and turns back to the grounds. The bouts continue, warriors from all four clans cycling through the rings, testing themselves against each other, the crowd shifting its loyalties with the easy fickleness of spectators who appreciate good fighting regardless of the banner it serves.
Evran's gaze drifts.
He scans the crowd, the viewing platforms, the staging areas, looking for blond hair and grey-blue clothing and the easy, studied confidence of believing himself untouchable.
He finds him.
Torsten is on the Windfar platform, seated near the back, a cup in his hand, watching the fights with an expression of casual disinterest that places him above the proceedings.
He is absent from the competition entirely, absent from the staging, absent from the rings, content to watch from the back row of someone else's platform.
The observation confirms something Evran has suspected since the ale room: Torsten is not a fighter.
He sends others to fight for him, hires hands and blades and intermediaries while he sits at a comfortable distance and watches the results.
The realization sharpens the contempt Evran feels for him into something precise and useful.
"Torsten isn't competing," Evran says.
Vaike's eyes do not move from the ring, but Evran feels the slight shift in his attention, the alertness that surfaces whenever Torsten's name is mentioned.
"No," Vaike says.
"What is his role in the Windfar clan? If he's not Warlord, not warrior, not council member." Evran keeps his voice neutral, conversational. "Why is he even here?"
Vaike takes a breath, the controlled kind, the kind that precedes information he does not particularly enjoy sharing.
"His uncle," Vaike says. "Merrik. He's second-in-command of the Windfar clan, Ragna's right hand. He has influence, and he's been using it on Torsten's behalf for years." He pauses. "Merrik has been pushing for the Windfar Warlord to name Torsten as heir. He very nearly succeeded."
"What stopped him?"
"Ragna married. Her wife gave birth to triplets six months ago." The corner of Vaike's mouth twitches, something dry and humorless. "Three healthy children eliminated the need for an outside heir. Torsten's path to the Windfar seat vanished overnight."
Evran processes this. He thinks about Torsten in the ale room, the easy confidence with which he discussed taking the Drakkari stronghold, the casual assumption that he was entitled to what he had not earned.
A man who spent years positioning himself for one throne and, when that door closed, immediately began looking for another.
The pattern reveals something fundamental about Torsten's character: he does not want a specific throne because he believes in the people it governs or the land it protects.
He wants a throne, any throne, because he wants power, and the form power takes matters less to him than possessing it.
"It makes sense, then," Evran says slowly. "Why he's eyeing your title. If the one he thought he was going to get has been taken from him."
Vaike huffs a sound that is almost a laugh but carries no warmth. "Torsten always goes for whatever he thinks is easiest prey. Once it was Windfar because his uncle had the Warlord's ear. Now it could just as easily be Drakkari because he thinks his bloodline buys him favors."
"I don't think he's looking for favors," Evran says.
The words come out sharper than he intended, and he feels Vaike's gaze shift to him, full attention, focused and searching.
"I think he's looking for something to happen to you," Evran continues, keeping his voice low, pitched beneath the noise of the crowd. "An assassination. An uprising. An accident."
The last word hangs between them. Evran thinks about the excursion to the eastern villages, open country, exposed.
He has already told Bran about what he overheard in the ale room.
Bran's face had gone still and hard and he had said I'll make sure Leona knows, we'll take precautions.
But precautions are not proof, and without proof they are running on suspicion and instinct and the information Evran gathered while pretending to be drunk on a man's shoulder.
"I know you're suspicious of Torsten," Vaike says, his voice even, patient, taking the concern seriously even if he does not fully share it.
"But without proof of his involvement, there is nothing to be done.
Suspicion is not evidence. A Warlord cannot accuse a member of another clan's delegation without concrete proof, especially not someone with Merrik's protection. "
"Merrik's protection," Evran repeats.