Chapter 5
The walls of the coliseum block the worst of the wind, but they’re nothing against the relentless downpour.
Calla doesn’t quite mind it. Droplets prick into her eyes, blurring the image of these Crescents before her.
She almost enjoys this feeling—reduced to the mercy of the elements and still standing her ground.
She swings her sword in an arc to the right.
Then the left. By the time she’s brandished the figure-eight loop multiple times, there’s yet to be any movement down the line, and she yells, “Come on! I don’t have all day. ”
The first Crescent charges, clutching the sword he’s plucked from the vaults. He’s holding it too tightly. Calla strikes hard, and the weapon flies out of his hands. The Crescent halts in his step, wide-eyed.
“You’re down,” Calla says. “Next!”
Over the morning, the number of Crescents guarding her had steadily increased.
Three turned to ten, which turned to twenty, making an absurd tail after her while she walked.
Clustering into a room when she was only stopping to get water.
Calla grew fed up enough to steer them all through the north wing, then into the coliseum.
Without the marketplace in operation, there’s plenty of open ground to spar.
Only a few stalls remain by the farthest entrance, too big to dismantle in haste.
Perhaps their owners will come back for the plywood and tarp.
Or perhaps the stalls were abandoned before the rain.
King Kasa raised the price to peddle in the coliseum, and August didn’t lower it.
As the royal advisor, Calla spent her time running after Anton and the crown.
She never got around to checking on the woman selling jelly cake, whether she landed on her feet after her last day running the stall.
I will, Calla had promised. I will accuse the palace of wrongdoing. I will save San-Er. I will right the kingdom.
When the second Crescent lunges, she allows her to come farther. A bit better. Some training. The arena’s sand has muddied with the rain, and Calla’s boot slides widely when she moves to block. The Crescent charged with such gusto that she’s left her middle wide open for Calla to ram into.
“I thought we were sparring,” Calla yells when the Crescent collapses. “It feels like I’m just kicking all your asses!”
She lost her way. She fell victim to palace politics.
Cared more about stopping Otta Avia than protecting the cities from such grappling.
But what’s done is done. Calla has returned where she operates best: the battlefields, the arenas.
She’s decided to test her protection team, wanting to see how adept the Crescent Societies really are.
Only then do they have some chance of claiming Talin, and then Calla will be better. She will.
It’s not until the third Crescent that someone finally decides to play dirty. The young man charges, two knives pulled. Calla raises her sword, and she feels a thrum—a pulse of qi, weakening her wrist. He strikes. Her grip on her weapon loosens; she dives and catches the pommel with her other hand.
Interesting.
Calla draws back. Evaluates.
The Crescents are not uniformly skilled.
Their members clearly had enough collective competence to combat the Weisannas in that initial attack.
Explosives planted, a secret entrance, a hostile takeover…
By the time Calla came through, they had stationed themselves around their winnings.
But if they’re going to march on August, they need soldiers.
Competent forces who can swing a sword and throw a blade, because there will be hundreds of Weisannas, and August will place them in rows and rows and unending rows before she can get to him.
She doesn’t want the newbies who swore fealty to the Crescent Societies weeks ago—she wants the legacy members who were born into it.
This Crescent brings his blade down, and Calla blocks.
“Not bad,” she says.
Lightning rips through the skies. Bright white and electric, aggressive enough to draw the young man’s attention away for a beat, and Calla sweeps her feet underneath him, sending him to the ground.
He rolls up immediately.
“Was that you?” he demands.
Calla, slowly, glances to the clouds. Thunder follows several seconds later, rumbling deeply through the twin cities.
“No,” she says. She isn’t sure, to tell the truth. She doesn’t know what she could do if she were to make the ask. Gather up all the qi in the air. Launch it skyward.
She pulls her gaze back to the arena.
“Come on. Keep going.”
Calla runs through the line of Crescents.
Half cannot hold their own in the slightest. A quarter are tolerable while exchanging blows with their blades.
On the second turn, it is the same young man with the qi trick who finally spars with Calla long enough that her breath grows short.
She is fighting with proper consideration.
This time, no lightning shakes from the skies to distract him.
“What’s your name?” she asks between strikes.
He barely looks twenty. She would put him closer to the age she was when she left the Palace of Heavens.
“Levi.”
“Levi,” Calla says, blocking his blow on her left side. “How were you trained?”
“I sparred often with my siblings, Your Highness.”
A flicker of movement, in her periphery.
Anton has come through one of the coliseum entrances.
He’s hurrying toward her. As Calla draws back a few steps, she scoops up one of the fallen swords, left in the sand after a Crescent’s embarrassing performance.
She throws the weapon to Anton the moment he nears, and rather unwillingly, he lunges forward to catch it.
“I need to speak to you,” Anton says.
“Help Levi out,” Calla replies.
“Calla.”
She swings. Anton can’t argue while she’s attacking him, so he counters the move, his eyes flicking behind her in a telltale gesture.
That gives Calla enough of a warning to pull back and block Levi’s swing, slamming hard into his blade.
It makes her teeth shake. Her crown thrums in question. She doesn’t care to tap into it yet.
“Calla.”
She ignores Anton. She’s watching her opponent: the blade, the twitch, and then—
Qi, shoving from the other direction. From Anton.
It takes her off-balance, and it pushes the weapon out of Levi’s hands.
Calla whirls back around, her sword rising, and Anton swings a forceful strike, pitching the blade out of her hands.
It lands with a thunk in the ground, burying amid sand and mud.
“You,” he says, pointing at Levi. “Stay put.” Anton discards his own sword so that it lands point down. He’s trying to defuse the sparring match. The blade embeds itself upright in the arena ground like some poor attempt at a headstone. “Calla. Now.”
“Yes,” Calla says. “Talk to me, darling.”
She’s not done. There is no warning before she attacks Anton again, her boots scraping two short spurts through the wet slush. He throws himself to the side, narrowly avoiding contact. When Anton uses his hands for a crutch to spring upright, Calla is already swinging her arm.
He counters her before she can land a hit. Rather than shove her away and recalibrate, Anton grips her arm hard, pulling her closer. Her spine settles against his chest.
“News from August’s camp,” he says into her ear. Only for her. “Otta is there.”
Calla rams her head back. It’s lucky that she isn’t any shorter, or the prongs of her crown would have struck his eyes. Instead, her hair cushions the hit against his nose, and Anton lets go with a hiss—a conveyance that she’s fighting too unfairly.
“Does that change anything for us?” she asks, spinning around.
Blood trickles from Anton’s nose onto his lip. “Of course.”
Calla’s pulse ratchets up. The rain falls fast enough to wash away the smear of his injury in seconds.
It does not wash clean his displeasure. He always speaks about Otta Avia the same way.
As though the mere mention of her name ought to prompt prayer and devotion, spectators clasping their hands together and falling to their knees.
Despite his promises of loyalty, despite kneeling before her in Eigi wanting to be her first soldier in this bid for the throne…
Anton Makusa has not wholly seceded from Otta. She can hear it.
The Crescents are all standing in witness to this parley. They do not want to interrupt.
Calla lunges. She’s on the offensive, her teeth gritted. There’s an opportunity to dive for her fallen sword, but she doesn’t take it. Her fist swings, and Anton parries in place of a counterattack. Her foot moves for a sweep. He darts out of the way.
He can keep doing this, but she will outlast this dance between them.
The crown whispers in her ear; it assures her that it is an unending source.
They have been evenly matched in the past, but circumstances have changed.
The last time they fought in this arena, the stands were filled.
Calla remembers the shouting, the glee, the commentator over the loudspeakers.
She couldn’t walk away. She couldn’t think past her need for comeuppance—the empty, eternal pit in her chest that no amount of blood filled, despite all her best efforts, despite felling everyone who had wronged her, who had let her suffer…
A sharp sting. Calla hisses, bringing her arm to her chest and flitting back several steps. A red line glares at her, quickly blotted with the rain.
Anton has pulled a knife from his sleeve.
“Cheat,” she accuses.
The coliseum stills, short of the pouring rain, and suddenly Calla is sick of being sodden. She wants it to stop. She wants to command the heavens to heel. There’s an immense pulse, and then there is complete silence.
An invisible barrier domes the space above the coliseum. Rain falls from the clouds and lands on the wave of qi that Calla is holding overhead. The Crescents stare up, their hands lifting to test for the presence of rain.