Chapter 75
Chapter Seventy-Five
Roremar
He turned too late.
Roremar was slammed to the ground and landed right on his shoulder. Pain radiated down the joint, and nausea swept through him as he rolled to his back beneath the man who had taken him down, trying to get weight off his arm.
He was almost afraid to look—afraid of what lurked down here—but he met a familiar pair of contemptuous eyes.
“Ritheus fucking Svalla,” Roremar ground out. “I’m so fucking tired of you.”
Gritting his teeth over the pain that swept through him with each movement, Roremar swung his good arm.
Svalla didn’t even see it coming as Roremar’s fist nailed his jaw. The crunch was satisfying, but the deranged competitor only laughed and spit blood on Roremar’s tunic.
“You’re finally fighting back,” Svalla said, and he ground one large palm against Roremar’s injured shoulder.
Pain exploded through him. Roremar squirmed, trying to break free. The joint—fuck, his entire arm felt like it was on fire.
Svalla leaned his weight further against him. “You think that’s bad?” He twisted his palm, pressing harder. “How do you think it feels to fucking die? How do you think my brother felt when you pushed that blade into his gut?”
Sweat poured down Roremar’s face. He couldn’t think through the pain. Couldn’t remember what Svalla was talking about.
“Your brother—”
“You killed him! It’s all I fucking see.
” Svalla’s knee was dug into Roremar’s gut, making him wheeze for air.
“And now you’ll know what it feels like.
” A punch to Roremar’s cheek, and his head snapped back, the tunnels dancing with black spots.
He couldn’t assemble his thoughts to fight back.
“The best part. No one is even going to know it’s my fault you die.
Not your cultish fans, and not that Fateblessed bitch. ”
That snarled word barreled through Roremar’s thoughts, vision tinting red.
“Don’t fucking call her that.” Roremar bucked, trying to throw Svalla off. But the movement was more erratic than strategic.
Every move sent another bolt of pain down his arm, followed by another wave of nausea.
Svalla pinned Roremar’s good arm down, the crazed gleam in his eye brightening as he hunched closer.
“Think I’ll keep her for myself. Take out the others one by one down here for what they’ve done to me.
” Roremar didn’t know what that meant, but he was trying too hard to focus his fragmented attention through the agony of his shoulder to figure it out.
“Think she’ll spread her legs for me as easily as she has for you? ”
Fury unlike anything he’d felt before burned through him, numbing the pain in his shoulder.
“Doesn’t matter,” Svalla said, pressing harder against him. “She will whether it’s easy or not.”
And Roremar exploded.
With the pure force of rage, he ripped his good arm from Svalla’s grasp and swung. His rings landed in Svalla’s eye socket, the metal biting in deep enough to send the man toppling off him.
Roremar rolled to his feet, legs steady but one arm useless. He didn’t have a single damned weapon on him, but Svalla didn’t either. Unfortunately, the man had a few inches and a lot of weight on his side.
Roremar was quick, though. Even without his mind fully functioning, his body reacted on instinct.
Steps light, he swiveled around to the other side of the tunnel while Svalla got to his feet. One of his eye’s was already swelling shut, cheek bloodied and mottled, and Roremar stayed in that blind spot.
Svalla swung around wildly, a roar cracking from his mouth. And the words he yelled next had Roremar even more confused than before.
“Not fucking again. Not my fucking eyesight.”
Roremar shook his head, reminding himself to focus. He didn’t wait to figure out what Svalla meant. He charged.
Roremar caught the much larger man around the gut and slammed him into the wall. They went down again, Roremar’s useless shoulder in pulsing, burning agony, and they became a flurry of fists.
Svalla gripped Roremar’s hair, throwing him to the ground. His head spun, but he reached out, trying to grasp on to anything—a rock or bone shard—anything that could help him.
His opponent’s crazed yelling went on. Things about his vision, about his brother.
“That wasn’t my fucking fault!” Roremar yelled, voice ragged as he tried to extricate himself. He scrambled back.
“Yes, it was! You killed him! You’re a Fatesdamned murderer.”
“They made me! I didn’t even know what I was doing there.” Svalla knocked Roremar beneath him, hand closing on his windpipe. He wheezed out, “What was I supposed to do?”
Roremar’s good hand skimmed the ground, his other tucked protectively to his chest.
“You were supposed to die,” Svalla gritted. His face was red, sweat pouring down his cheeks and mixing with the blood. “Like you will now—”
That last word sliced into a gurgle, and warm liquid splashed across Roremar’s face and chest.
Svalla toppled to the side, a figure hovering over them, face shadowed by the candles flickering on the wall behind him.
The newcomer shifted, and when Roremar saw brown curls damp with sweat and sticking to his temples, air whooshed into his lungs.
“Rian,” he said hoarsely.
Rian tried to help him up, but Roremar hissed when he gripped his bad arm.
“Fuck,” he panted, pushing into a seated position and leaning against the wall. He cradled his arm to his chest. The pain mounted now that the threat was gone. His shoulder had its own heartbeat.
“Break something?” Rian asked, kicking Svalla’s limp form to the opposite side of the tunnel, double and triple checking that he was unconscious.
Based on the amount of blood, he wouldn’t be waking up again. Roremar was relieved, though he mourned what this tournament was doing to all of them.
Svalla wouldn’t have even wanted his life if they hadn’t been thrown into the arena in the first place. If they hadn’t been told this tournament was a means to fame and fortune—to Emmeline’s power.
They weren’t to blame. It was the Chancellor and all the fucking Fates at fault.
“My shoulder,” Roremar hissed out. “Don’t think its broken or dislocated.” He tested moving it, but cried out at the pain shooting through him. “Fuck, maybe partially, I don’t know.”
“Here.” Rian helped Roremar sit forward then sliced his tunic up the back and removed it.
He ripped off a piece, and Roremar used it to wipe Svalla’s blood from his skin as Rian fashioned the rest of the fabric into a makeshift sling.
He fiddled with it for a while to ensure it was holding Roremar’s arm properly, jittery energy rolling off him.
Every time he said he was done, he checked the positioning again.
“It’s okay,” Roremar said, eyeing Rian warily. He tugged at the knot himself. “See?”
Eyes flicking around, Rian nodded.
Roremar could finally take a deeper breath. The sling relieved a lot of the pressure on his shoulder but also restricted his movement. Hopefully no one else came after him.
“Thanks,” Roremar said. Getting to his feet, he nodded at the blade Rian had used to cut his tunic. “Where’d you get that?”
Rian pulled it from his waist, holding out the single-bladed dagger. “Found a cavern a few tunnels over. Walls leading to it had been messily demolished—probably not safe to go back—but there were a lot of artifacts. I took a few.”
Rian spun the blade toward the nearest candlelight, the intricate carvings around the hilt catching the light. “Everything looked old but like it was once expensive. Minimal damage.”
“How many fucking secrets are hiding down here?” Roremar muttered, mostly to himself.
“Know where we are?” Rian asked. His gaze flicked around nervously again.
“Tunnels beneath the city, I’m pretty sure.” Roremar racked his memory for details. “Catacombs and other passageways, but also, according to Valyrie, where a lot of ancient things are buried.”
Rian didn’t question him on the mention of the Angel. He nodded, pulling a second dagger from his waist and eyeing Roremar’s bloody mess. “Take this. You could use it.”
“That bad?” Roremar hissed at the implication of how rough he appeared, pain throbbing through the rest of his body more by the minute.
“That bad,” Rian said.
He took the dagger with his free, non-dominant hand and tested out the grip. It would do.
He was pretty sure his lip was swelling and that he had a nice bruise forming along his cheek as well as a sticky trail from his hairline. With the remnants of Svalla’s blood on him, he likely looked even worse.
“Let’s figure out how to get the fuck out of here. Which way did you come from?”
Rian gestured in the direction Roremar thought he’d also started if he was remembering the layout and growth of the plants on the walls correctly, which he couldn’t be sure of given how fuzzy his mind still was. They turned the opposite way.
Roremar sighed. “Here goes nothing.”
As they began the trek, Rian looked like he wanted to second guess it, but he followed. Roremar’s skin beat the entire time as if he was being watched.
“Valyrie,” Rian said after they’d walked for a bit. They’d agreed to try to follow signs of life—plants, anything that looked recently disturbed—and had been doing so in silence. Roremar was still trying to put together pieces of the night, everything feeling an inch out of reach.
“What about her?” he asked, kicking a rock down the way. It skipped over the stone, the clatter ringing in the silence, but nothing answered.
“What else did she say?” Rian asked, gaze constantly swiveling around them.
Roremar thought back to that meeting in the Council House.
“I can’t remember it all,” Roremar admitted, frustration grating through his chest. “The first task was about strength and morality, pushing competitors to those limits. Seems the duel was pretty spot on with what she’d planned originally.
The second was also similar—hers was about poison.
They had to drink from cups and solve riddles to figure out which would poison her.
” Roremar tried to recall not only what Valyrie had implied but what Emmeline had seen.
“I think the original competitors were pretty nefarious even before they won, sabotaging one another. Valyrie allowed it because it proved what she needed of them.”
“What does that mean?” Rian asked.
Roremar paused for a beat but answered, “The Fates.” Rian blinked at him. “The initial purpose of this tournament wasn’t for entertainment. Valyrie used it to choose twelve warriors to turn into the Fates.”
Rian swore, gazing down the tunnel and at the stones overhead as if seeing everything in a different light. A new threat.
Roremar figured if they were stuck together, he may as well tell Rian the rest. Maybe talking would jog his memory. “Emmeline has a scroll. It’s written in Endasi—”
“The language of the Angels?”
Roremar nodded, continuing their slow walk. “It’s about the original Races. She’s been trying to translate it, but we couldn’t get any clues about this final one outside of what Valyrie told us herself.”
“Which is?”
“She didn’t know what Rocarri planned, how he would spin it, but her initial purpose…” He picked through his memory. “It was something they had to face. A challenge…” He grasped at a fluttering, elusive thought. “Fears, I think. To see what they could withstand.”
Rian considered that as they came to a crossroads of five tunnels and paused. “That can’t be it.”
“What?”
“It can’t just be about their fears,” Rian reasoned. “This entire tournament plays on a fear of dying and what we’re willing to do to win. This final task only being about facing a fear is too simple. Aren’t you supposed to be clever?”
Right now, his mind didn’t feel clever at all, and that frustrated Roremar to the end of the realms. His greatest asset was failing him.
He groaned. “What do you think it is, then?”
“The Fates are known for being twisted, right? For giving fortunes that aren’t straightforward and requiring us to unravel what they mean?
It’s about things being written in the stars and us trusting their guidance implicitly.
” It was the most Rian had spoken consecutively since he’d told Roremar of his brother.
He saw his point. “So, you think Valyrie lied?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I think she left something out.”
Roremar thought back to Emmeline’s reading of the original Races.
She’d said after the third trial, Valyrie had been pouring her power into the twelve warriors who won in order to turn them into the Fates.
Not that they were ripped from the stars or taken from another realm as some legends said, but that she’d gifted them a drop of her own magic.
Ordinary warriors made extraordinary thanks to her power.
But if Valyrie was going to give up her own magic…
Fates, his head spun, every answer dancing at the edge of his reach, but he stretched out a little further, exercised the muscles of his mind that were his greatest strength.
His greatest strength.
It wasn’t typical poison. It bonded them to her, Emmeline had explained.
And he grasped one answer.
“She took something, too,” Roremar recalled. “In the poison trial, Valyrie took something to bond the contestants to her, to ensure a connection. Collateral.”
“She found out what their greatest fears were?” Rian guessed.
“Fear can be a weakness, and she wanted them to conquer it. For Starsearchers in particular, fear of the unknown can be the greatest.”
“Because we’re supposed to trust the Fates,” Rian agreed.
Roremar’s father’s words echoed through his fractured memory: Two things at once.
Starsearchers could be two things at once, and Valyrie used that in forging her Fates.
Roremar nodded as he tried to hold on to the budding theory, shifting his sling to sit more comfortably.
“Valyrie took the competitors’ greatest fears or something that marked their past during the poison trial and wielded it against them in the third to decipher what their Fately spectrums would be. ”
The tournament was always about the Fates, after all. How they’d be primed to become what she needed them to, how they’d be bonded to her. What they’d represent to Starsearchers…
How they’d manipulate them.
“Manipulation…” Roremar breathed.
His memory—the way he couldn’t recall the pivotal information he needed, how ideas kept floating away from his grasp.
Svalla, and how he’d claimed he kept seeing his brothers’ death over and over again, how he’d said he lost his vision again.
Roremar’s mind failing him, Svalla’s loyalty blinding him.
“It’s manipulating us,” Roremar whispered.
Rian scanned the cavern they’d stopped in, the five crossroads branching off. “How…”
Roremar stood at the head of one of the tunnels, staring into the piercing darkness. “They’re wielding our strengths and fears against us.”