Chapter Ten
Trial of the Bound Blade
The third trial was announced with considerably more ceremony than the two that had preceded it, a formal notice delivered not by runner but by a herald who climbed all the way down to Maren's hollow himself, his fine High Reach robes looking distinctly out of place against the salt worn stone of the Under-City ledge path, to inform Calla in person that the Trial of the Bound Blade would be held in the open arena above the cliffs, before a public audience, in five days' time.
"They want spectacle for this one," Maren said, once the herald had gone, her expression tight with a concern that had become increasingly familiar to Calla over the preceding weeks.
"The first two trials tested you privately, with only the court and your fellow contestants as witnesses.
A public combat trial serves a different purpose entirely.
It reminds every house in Ilyra, and every soul in the Under-City besides, exactly whose strength and whose blood the Tally is truly measuring. "
"What does that mean for how I should prepare?"
"It means you should prepare exactly as you have been preparing," Maren said, "and understand, additionally, that whatever happens in that arena will be witnessed by considerably more people than the previous trials, including, I would guess, a fair number of your own neighbors from the Under-City, who will have climbed the cliff path specifically for the privilege of watching whether a Duskane can hold her own against houses that have never once known what it means to fight for something with genuine desperation behind the effort. "
The days leading up to the trial passed in a blur of physical preparation that left Calla's body aching in ways her weeks of vow lore study never had, Maren proving as capable a hand with a blade as she was with the brittle old book of founding tongue translations, though she was quick to note, more than once, that her own combat training had gone rusty with disuse.
"I was never meant for this particular trial myself," she admitted, during one exhausted evening session, watching Calla work through a defensive drill with the particular critical eye of someone assessing genuine progress rather than offering empty encouragement.
"My own strengths, back when I still had cause to develop them, lay in the subtler trials.
But the bones of proper defense do not change much across the years, and you have good instincts, Calla, better than I expected given how little time we've had to develop them properly. "
"Good instincts and a rusty teacher against houses who've trained from childhood."
"Good instincts, a rusty teacher, and considerably more motivation than most of your rivals will ever understand," Maren corrected, with a dry edge that nonetheless carried genuine confidence beneath it.
"Do not discount that final advantage simply because it cannot be measured the way a blade's edge can be measured.
Desperation sharpens a mind considerably more reliably than comfort ever has. "
Calla saw Oda twice in those five days, brief exchanges snatched between their respective preparations, and found her friend uncharacteristically subdued on both occasions, a tension in her usually easy manner that Calla eventually pressed her to explain.
"My mother competed in this trial," Oda admitted finally, on the evening before the trial itself, the two of them sharing a quiet corner of the High Reach gardens where Calla had first spoken privately with Ademar weeks before.
"Two cycles ago. She was matched against a contestant from House Blackreef, considerably before Sera's time, though the family's reputation for ruthlessness in this particular trial predates even her own competing years.
My mother lost. Not merely the match, though she lost that too.
She lost the use of her sword arm permanently, a consequence the trial's binding magic considers entirely within its proper bounds, because the Trial of the Bound Blade does not merely test skill.
It binds each combatant to accept whatever genuine harm the contest produces, no illusion, no trick of magic softening the blow.
What happens in that arena happens to your actual body, and it does not undo itself once the trial concludes. "
Calla felt a chill move through her that the evening's mild air did nothing to explain. "You should have told me this before now."
"I should have," Oda agreed, "and I didn't, because some cowardly part of me kept hoping I wouldn't need to, that we'd somehow both avoid drawing a match dangerous enough to matter.
That was foolish of me. I'm telling you now because I'd rather you walk into that arena tomorrow with clear eyes than with false confidence, whatever comfort the false confidence might have offered in the meantime. "
"What happened to your mother, after."
"She never competed again, obviously," Oda said, her voice carrying a carefully controlled flatness that Calla recognized, by now, as her friend's particular way of holding grief at arm's length while still, somehow, allowing herself to speak of it.
"She raised me one handed, mostly, learned to compensate for what the trial had taken, and told me, more times than I can properly count, that the Tally does not care whether the price it extracts is fair.
It only cares whether the price is paid.
I've spent most of my life deciding whether that lesson meant I should never enter this competition myself, or whether it meant I owed it to her to enter anyway, with clearer eyes than she'd had, and try to win what she couldn't."
Calla reached for her friend's hand, and Oda let her take it, a small, uncharacteristic concession from a woman who wore her toughness like armor in nearly every other circumstance Calla had witnessed.
"Whatever happens tomorrow," Calla said, "I'm glad it's you standing beside me through this, rather than facing it alone."
"Save the sentiment until after we've both survived it," Oda said, though something in her voice had softened considerably, the flat control giving way, briefly, to something warmer.
"I intend to hold you to that gladness for a good many more trials yet, Calla Duskane.
Don't go dying in the first proper combat and ruin my plans for a longer friendship. "
The arena, when Calla climbed into its wide stone bowl the following morning, occupied a natural amphitheater carved into the cliff face just below High Reach's main plateau, tiered seating rising in concentric rings around a sunken sand floor that had clearly seen considerably more combat than the Tally's ceremonial trials alone could account for.
The crowd filling those tiers was, as Maren had predicted, considerably larger and considerably more mixed than any audience Calla had yet performed before, the fine silks of High Reach's Blood Houses mingling, in the upper reaches, with the plainer garments of Under-City residents who had made the long climb specifically to witness this particular trial.
Calla scanned the crowd briefly before the trial began and found, with a small jolt of surprised warmth, her father's face among the upper tiers, standing beside a figure she recognized, after a moment, as one of the fishing crew he worked with along the lower quay, both of them craning forward with an intensity that told her, more clearly than words could have, exactly how much this moment mattered to him.
High Warden Cassian Thorne presided over the trial from a raised platform at the arena's edge, his composed stillness unchanged even beneath the weight of the crowd's restless energy, and beside him, Empress Isadora sat in a position of ceremonial prominence, her expression carrying the same measured neutrality Calla had come to associate with every public appearance the woman made, though Calla thought, watching her closely, that a certain sharpness had crept into that neutrality since the sacrifice trial, a wariness that had not been present at the opening ceremony.
"The Trial of the Bound Blade tests a single principle," Thorne announced, his voice carrying across the full breadth of the amphitheater without apparent strain.
"That the office of Voice requires not merely the wisdom to certify a vow correctly, but the strength to defend the Concord itself when defense becomes necessary.
Each contestant will be matched, and each match will proceed until one combatant yields, is rendered unable to continue, or the trial's binding magic determines the contest genuinely resolved.
Yield honorably, and you forfeit only the match.
Refuse to yield when continuation would cause harm beyond what the Concord deems proportionate, and the binding magic will end the contest regardless of either combatant's wishes. "
The pairings were called in sequence, and Calla watched, with a knot of apprehension tightening steadily in her chest, as contestant after contestant took the sand floor, some matches concluding within moments, a swift yield or a decisive strike ending the contest before the crowd had properly settled into watching, others stretching longer, more grueling, the particular grim intensity of combatants genuinely testing each other's full capacity rather than performing a token contest for the crowd's benefit.
Sera Blackreef's match, when it came, ended almost before Calla had finished registering that it had begun, a series of movements so economical and so precisely controlled that her opponent, a broad shouldered young man from a minor house Calla did not recognize, found himself disarmed and yielding within the space of perhaps a dozen exchanges, his expression carrying a shocked, humiliated fury that Sera's own blank composure did nothing to acknowledge.