Chapter 12
THE CHALLENGE
Drazha strode forward, her staff in her hand, the pale light of the risen moon gleaming on her bare arms. The beads were gone, only the one necklace at her throat.
She raised the staff. “I challenge the sorceress’s entry.”
Khal was frozen next to me, unmoving. I saw Sephar melt back into the shadow of the crowd to lurk. People were murmuring, but I didn’t stretch the magic to comprehend. I only knew what Khal next to me was saying: “Mom. Don’t do this.”
She dropped the staff, let it fall. “What weapon do you choose, sorceress’s champion?”
Khal looked to the old woman who had been presiding. Her eyes were pitying. “Drazha has recused herself from judgment. She has the right of challenge. What weapon will you take?”
I searched for Vrathgar in the crowd, found him. He was there with Tyralk, and instead of the reassurance I had hoped for, he looked ashen. As Khal said “Only a staff—" next to me, I saw him grimace, mutter some curse.
“The sorceress’s defender has chosen the staff. What tool is chosen by the challenger, Drazha of the half blade?”
“Vrygolth,” was the word I heard, and as the whispers rippled through the crowd, the magic punched into my mind the image of a short spear with a blade on each end. In the burst of intensity before I had to pull the magic back, one voice from the crowd ripped through. “She’d use a blade?”
I knew very little about weapons as they were taught. I knew my education was meager. But the guards at my father’s castle did not train with real blades. Blades were only drawn when the holder was willing to kill.
Khal started to step forward, and without thinking, I grasped his wrist. He looked down at me. “I will be alright,” he said. He didn’t smile. “She will not kill me.”
Not, “I can beat her.” Not, “This will be fine.”
“Trust me,” he said. “I said I would take care of you.” He didn’t pull his arm away.
Maybe I owed him this much trust. Maybe letting him handle conflict with his own family and people was the least I could do. I let him go.
He strode to the center of the ring. “Vrathgar. You have my staff?”
His friend produced a short pole of dark wood, smooth-polished in the light, and the old woman took it to weigh in her hands. “Honorable,” she said.
Drazha held out her own spear, with its two wickedly curving blades. The old woman examined it, handed it back to her. Her voice was heavy. “...honorable.”
They each received their weapons, their gaze not breaking from each other across the circle. Drazha’s original staff was taken to rest in someone else’s hands, and the old woman left them in the center, stood outside that stone edge.
“Death is not our object,” the chieftess recited. “But we bear the danger nobly. He who yields, yields his purpose.” She raised her hands. “Be joined in honor.”
Drazha exploded into action.
Khal was fast. I’d seen him be fast, before, with the giant cat, the monster.
Now I saw where it came from, that fluid technique, that fierce focus.
His staff blurred, his steps taking him backwards as Drazha pressed the attack.
His heel almost touched the stone edge of the circle and voices rose in warning from the sidelines.
Near the edge, he rallied. He turned, sending her blade past his shoulder and leaving her open. But he didn’t strike. He faltered a half moment, and she regained the upper hand and sent her blade slicing through his forearm, to whoops and shrieks of shock.
“Blood,” she barked, and it took me a moment to register it as language before she yelled, “Yield!”
He readied his staff. “No.”
She pressed the attack again.
Khal was fast, but he wasn’t vicious. Drazha was faster. Now, blood drawn, it seemed like he tried to take the offensive, but his blows didn’t land, whether from his own reluctance or some weakness, I couldn’t tell.
Fabric ripped. A line of red bloomed at his thigh.
“Two blood,” she shouted. “Yield!”
He stood in a ready stance, the crimson soaking his trouser-leg, shiny on his hand where it gripped the bough. “I do not yield.”
“Foolish,” she spat, and attacked.
They were circling the ring, him almost always moving back, eyes trained on her.
Drops of blood blended with the dust. In the next flurry he landed a blow, glancing her back, and the crowd gasped.
He froze, and she took advantage to almost slice towards his chest, her son barely getting the staff up in time.
“You can’t fight me?” she snarled. “Is this what I trained you for?” She pressed in.
He was slowing. My heart was in my throat, strangling me.
“Is this what you do with my teaching?” A blow glanced off his guard, and he barely stopped the follow-up from slicing into his shoulder. “Is this how you face your mother?”
He struck out, and I saw the moment he realized he’d moved in error, the moment her hilt struck his wrist, and his staff spun away into the sand.
Her blade stopped at his neck. “Yield,” she said.
They should both be breathing hard. I could tell Drazha was.
Her bosom heaved, her blade the only part of her deadly still.
Khal…I didn’t even know for sure how many wounds were seeping the blood that dripped down his fingers, only saw how steady he raised his eyes from the blade beside his throat to the woman with the spear. “No,” he said quietly.
The blade pressed against his neck, a thin line of red appearing. “Yield!” she barked.
He took a step forward, the blade following him, staying pressed against his throat. “I do not yield.”
The blade whirled, sliced again. Gasps rose. Not his throat, I held that fact like a lifeline. Not his throat.
“Yield!”
“I do not yield.”
The next blow took him to his knees.
She raised the blade to his throat again, lifted his gaze to her. Her breath was ragged. “Yield.” I did not know if she ordered or if she begged.
“My mother asked,” he said, “what I was trained for.” His gaze did not falter. “I was trained to keep my oaths. I was trained,” he said, “to not abandon my people.”
“Not for this,” she hissed. “Not for this!”
A smile lifted the side of his mouth. There was blood on his lip, from the bludgeon that had taken him to his knees. “Drazha of the half blade. You did not raise me to stay your child.”
They stayed there, frozen in space, the blade at his throat, his blood on the length, and for a heartbeat, it looked like my power had broken out again, like the time I had held the child frozen on the road.
But this was not my power. My power was the fragile bands of understanding that linked me to their words.
My power was the clammy heat in my palms that I would not release.
This was him. This was her. Hanging there, still, as if all the world had stopped its breath.
She threw the spear into the earth. “I yield.” Her voice was ragged with emotion, whether anger or sorrow or something else, I could not read.
Khal climbed to his feet, unsteady, bowed to her. “Thank you, Mother.”
She wavered, as if she would step towards him, but she held back, squared. “The marrying-in of the sorceress has been accepted. If you want to keep your pet,” she spat, “see that she’s married to someone. We are not the Gol Droth. We do not make bastards here.” She stalked from the circle.
There were murmurs of questions around me, but my ability to hold onto the magic was already waning, stretched too tight. Khal turned to me, and smiled. “Rowena,” he said. He took a few steps.
And then his legs gave out.
My knees buckled as I caught him, both of us stumbling and slipping on the stone border of the circle. And then Vrathgar was next to me, lowering him down onto the damp earth, running his hands roughly over to check for the bleeding. “Nothing looks deep,” he grunted. “Besides the calf.”
Most of the orcs were still giving us a wide berth, curious eyes and a lack of concern. Was it because they knew Vrathgar could heal him? Or were we so much outsiders that it didn’t matter?
Gnarlak lowered himself beside us, his hand already inside the pouch at his side.
“Easy. Let me see him.” He pulled out a handful of green, moss, maybe, and the grizzled orc started packing and binding the wounds, working quickly to stem the ones weeping blood.
And now we weren’t alone, other faces I recognized, his fellow warriors from the band, clustered around us, as if making a wall.
Gnarlak grunted. “Wake him up, Vrathgar,” he said, and Vrathgar dug a knuckle into Khal’s breastbone.
His eyes opened. They were unfixed. He gasped “Rowena—"
“Yes, she’s here, you bloody idiot,” Vrathgar snapped, and jerked his head at me. “Talk to him. We need him awake. Talk.”
I wasn’t sure where I fit next to him, with Gnarlak and Vrathgar moving over his wounds, how to stay out of their way. I knelt by his head, said, “I’m here. You…you won, and I’m here.” Talk. I needed to talk. “That was really frightening.”
“You were frightened for me?” His voice sounded strange, thick, and I realized he was still speaking Orcish.
I said something in the affirmative. He reached up, a little clumsy, and touched my cheek.
The pupils of his eyes were larger than normal.
“I’m sorry that I scared you. It needed done.
” His hand was cold, and when I caught it in mine, the rough skin of his knuckles was sticky and colder.
I looked up at Vrathgar, seeking some reassurance, and he just muttered, “Talk.”
“I’m…I’m a little angry at you,” I said, through my raw throat. “I feel like you hid this from me. And like you were way more likely to die than you owned up to. I don’t like…there being secrets between us.”
“That makes sense,” he said. And he turned and threw up on the ground.
Vrathgar cursed. Gnarlak and another one- Hagmar, I think- were turning him on his side, pulling him away from the sick. I was shaking, all of me. I had seen people cooked alive in a fire that I’d created, but this was scarier, just watching him be wrong and I didn’t know why.