It was clear at a glance that, without even moving, Ruc had backed Nayat into a corner. The men and women sitting on those seats around the pit hadn’t paid good coin to watch a fight that lasted barely four heartbeats. Even those who had won money betting on Ruc seemed vaguely disappointed, and those who lost were howling for the opportunity to double down. The scene hadn’t quite turned ugly, not yet, but it was clear from the tension in Nayat’s neck and shoulders that she felt the menace just the same as I did, the coming violence like a sound pitched just on the edge of human hearing.
Nayat raised her hands for quiet. The quiet was longer in arriving this time, and when it came it was frayed at the edges with mutters and murmurs.
“I would pay you,” she said, turning back to Ruc, “but I don’t have anyone for you to fight.” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder, toward where the blond man’s friends had carried him away. “I didn’t plan on you shattering Fion’s jaw quite so quickly. Maybe tomorrow night.…”
And then, while she was still speaking, while the mass of men and women in the room were still leaning forward, angry and eager to hear what would happen next, I did something that I still can’t quite explain.
I think that partly it was the crowd pressing in behind me. The only open space was in that pit, where Nayat stood with her arm around Ruc’s shoulders, and something, some old voice inside me that had been silent almost since childhood, whispered in my ear: It’s safer there. This, obviously, was madness.
Or maybe it wasn’t actually that voice at all, but the same girlish impulse that had driven me to follow Ruc out of the temple in the first place, some visceral thrill at the simple sight of him, the cut of his chest, the way he moved, the beauty of his skin beneath all those bruises. Or, maybe I just wanted to test myself. Rassambur is filled with tests, opportunities to pit the mind, or body, or spirit against something greater. Life outside those walls can feel blanched and attenuated, a series of motions leached of their meaning. Maybe it was as simple as that: I wanted to see what I could do.
“I’ll fight him,” I said.
The words landed in the pit, bright and unmistakable as coins, though what I hoped to buy with them, I had no idea.
Nayat heard the challenge, but when she raised her eyes to find the source, she looked right past me, presumably scanning the throng for some more obvious pugilist. I stepped down into the topmost rank of benches.
“I’ll fight him,” I said again.
Nayat saw me finally, frowned, then shook her head.
“Who in Hull’s name are you?”
“Does it matter?”
“As a matter of fact,” the woman replied, “it does. People come here to see a fight. I know every fighter in this city. I do not know you.”
Ruc, who before had seemed almost indifferent to the entire proceeding, looked up at me sharply when I spoke, narrowing that one unswollen eye to the barest slit, as though he were trying to see me through a blaze of a blinding light. As he studied me, he slipped out from beneath Nayat’s broad arm. It didn’t look like much—just a casual step to the side—but he shrugged as he moved, loosening his neck and back. He flexed the hand that he’d used to knock down the blond giant, testing it.
“I’ll fight her,” he said quietly. He’d never stopped looking at me.
It wasn’t until he smiled that I realized just how stupid I’d been. Since arriving in Sia, I’d given three people to the god—one every two months—and though I was certain no one had seen me, it was ludicrous to flaunt my presence. Not just my presence, but my skills. Which brought me to another part of the stupidity—for all I knew, Ruc Lan Lac would take me apart down in that pit. I might leave Rishinira’s Rage with a broken leg or a missing eye. Judging from the way Ruc punched, I might not leave at all.
It wasn’t the thought of death that bothered me; even then, I trusted in Ananshael’s justice and his mercy. A purposeless death, however, one that I’d thrown myself into for no other reason than a stranger’s green eyes—eye, I corrected myself—it would be an indignity to the history of my order, to the women and men who had labored so hard and patiently to train me. Worse and more probably, I might leave the pit alive, but with an injury that would leave me unfit to serve my god.
Those, of course, were the risks and possibilities I should have considered before opening my mouth. By the time Ruc had agreed to the fight, every glazed, drunken eye in the place was on me. In moments, the underlying chord of all those voices shifted from the thrumming bass note of building rage to the quicker counterpoint of argument and negotiation. I could only catch scraps of the conversation:
… She’s inches shorter.…
… A woman …
… All beat up. If she just …
… Four to one. Eight …
Though Nayat hadn’t yet agreed, her bookmakers were already moving through the rows of men and women, trying to drum up the next round of betting.
Ruc ignored it all. He seemed to have a knack for ignoring things. His gaze stayed fixed on me even as Nayat turned to him.
“Want to introduce your paramour?”
“I wish I could,” he replied. “I only just met her myself.”
Nayat frowned. “Doesn’t seem like you.”
To my surprise, Ruc grinned. “What? Meeting a woman?”
“Fighting someone who can’t fight back.”
“Oh, she can fight.”
Nayat turned back to me, her eyes sharp, appraising. “How do you know?”
“You remember how it is,” Ruc replied. “Sometimes you just know.”
The huge woman nodded as she considered me a moment longer, ran her eyes over the crowd, nodded to herself, as though she’d come to a decision, then turned back to me.
“You got a name?”
I nodded. “Perra.”
“All right, then, Perra. What’s your price?”
I hadn’t considered this. Violence, for the priestess of Ananshael, is a form of devotion. Our order accepts contracts, of course, sums of thousands to kill important people quietly, thoroughly. Whatever I’d been thinking of, however, when I first stepped toward that pit, it hadn’t been money. Still, it would look strange—even stranger than it already looked—if I didn’t ask for anything.
“Ten suns,” I said. “If I win, they’re mine.”
“And just on the vanishingly small chance that you don’t win?” Ruc asked. His face was still, sober, but I could hear the smirk in his voice.
“Where I was raised, a woman doesn’t get paid for losing.”
Looking back, sometimes I think the difference between being a woman of fifty and a girl of nineteen is half a heartbeat. Or, to be more precise, thousands of half heartbeats, millions of them, inserted between each hot impulse and the action that follows, just a sliver of calm consideration. It is an entirely reasonable amount of time, although for me, for quite a few years, that moment for reflection and reevaluation proved stubbornly elusive. And so here again, standing in front of hundreds of people, I’d said something very, very stupid.
Nayat snorted. “And where, exactly, were you raised?”
Ruc just lifted his eyebrows, patiently waiting for the response.
I shook my head, though half the damage was already done. Hot blood flushed my cheeks.
“I’m not going to win any coin if we spend the whole night talking.”
“I’d wager,” Nayat replied, “that you’re not going to win any coin either way, but you want to fight, he wants to fight. They,” she went on, gesturing toward the restive crowd, “want you to fight. I’m not gonna get in the way.”
I don’t remember actually descending the steps through the ranked benches. One moment, it seemed, I was standing on the warped boards of the first floor of Nayat’s tavern, the next I’d reached the damp dirt at the bottom of the pit. It was like standing at the center of some huge, thousand-petaled flower, each of those petals a leering human face. A score of broad lanterns hung on chains from the beams direct
ly overhead; the light was almost sun-bright, but shifting, unreliable, so that those faces in the crowd seemed animated by something beyond their own emotion, as though their own shadows writhed unseen just below the skin.
Ruc’s face, by contrast, was still.
“So,” he said, when I reached the center of the pit. “You were following me after all.”
I started to shake my head, to try to explain the whole strange situation all over again, then stopped myself. The truth—that I’d met him by chance at Antreem’s Mass, then followed him here, then offered to fight him based on an inexplicable urge—was too strange to believe. Instead of arguing, I smiled.
“Can you blame me?”
“Not sure it’s really a question of blame.”
I cocked my head to the side. “What is the question?”
“What you’re trying to do, and how bad I need to hurt you to stop you from doing it.”
“How do you know you don’t want me to do it?”
I was aiming for coquettish, ended up hitting a little wide of petulant.
Ruc just snorted. “Call it a hunch.”
“While I enjoy,” Nayat cut in, “a pre-beating courtship dance as much as the next woman, I wonder if we might move toward the main event.”
I glanced up at the crowd once more. The bookmakers were still working in pairs taking bets, one man collecting the coin, the other jotting down names, odds, and amounts in some kind of shorthand. Those who had already made their wagers settled into the typical taunts of the bombast of bettors everywhere. From what I could hear, no one seemed to think much of my chances, which was understandable. Ruc Lan Lac had to outweigh me by forty pounds, his reach was at least a full hand longer than my own, and he was clearly no stranger to the ring.
On the other hand, he hadn’t been trained by the priestesses and priests of death.
I turned away from the crowd to meet his level stare. “I’m ready.”
“No,” Nayat said, stepping forward, “you’re not.” She waggled a finger at my legs. “You move like you’ve got some steel tucked away under those pants. I don’t mind a little death in my pit, but if you plan to kill a man—especially a good-looking fighter like Ruc—you’re going to have to do it with your fists.”
By this point, I’d waded so deep into my own idiocy that it didn’t take much to slip the twin knives from their sheaths and toss them to the dirt. That brought an angry hiss from the crowd, and a renewed round of taunts. Ruc glanced at the blades, then back at me. He shook his head.
“Why are all the interesting people the ones who are trying to kill me?”
“If I were trying to kill you,” I replied, “I would have held on to the knives.”
“It’s easy enough to kill a man without knives.”
“I’m not trying to kill you.”
“Well,” he said, shrugging, “I guess we’ll find out.”
Nayat picked up the knives, tucked them into the back of her wide leather belt, then turned to us.
“I have to say,” she began, using her show voice, “that I, for one, am very interested to see what happens next.” She gestured us forward, took me by one wrist and Ruc by the other. Her grip was even stronger than I’d expected. She looked at me, frowned, then shook her head. “Try to stay on your feet a little longer than the last asshole.”
Before I could reply, she dropped our wrists, stepped back, and Ruc was attacking.
It wasn’t what I’d expected, wasn’t at all the way he’d fought the last fight, and the surprise almost undid me. Instead of waiting, gauging the distance, looking for the counter-strike, he came at me with a snake-quick right cross. Only my thousands of hours sparring in the wide sandstone squares of Rassambur saved me. I slipped to my left, felt the punch slide by my face, fell into a roll that gave me a tiny bit of space, then came up with my hands in front of me.
Ruc grunted. “Yep, you’re a fighter. Sometimes I hate being right.”
It will sound like an excuse, but it’s nothing more than the simple truth when I say the crowd won the fight for him that night. Or, to be more precise, the crowd is why I lost. Ruc was fast and smart. Lots of people know how to hit; some fighters even know how to move. Only a very few, however, have the experience and presence of mind to see the pattern beneath all the skin and speed, to work inside that pattern, to twist it to their own purposes. Ruc was one of the latter.
It was almost immediately obvious that in a stand-up fight he was better than me. On the other hand, aside from taking my knives, Nayat had said nothing about forbidden moves, and I knew a lot more moves than Ruc. He was good, but he was used to bruisers like the one he’d brought down earlier in the night, big men who would come at him with blows to the face and body. I discarded that approach before the fight even started. Instead, I spent most of my time ducking and rolling, attacking him with stiffened fingers rather than fists, striking for the more obscure targets that were actually within my reach: the nerve at the elbow, the tendon at the side of the leading knee. He was quick and adaptable, but his instincts were all wrong, and instincts take years to change.
What I hadn’t counted on was the noise of the crowd. It’s not uncommon, back in Rassambur, to spar in front of the other priestesses and priests. I’d fought hundreds of times in front of a large group, but not all groups are the same. Ananshael’s faithful tend to watch fights, even fights to the death, with a combination of bright interest and cool, intellectual detachment. In fact, most of my sisters and brothers approach a fight the same way they approach a piece of music: as something to be studied, critiqued, and, in the case of the true masters, revered. That night in Rishinira’s Rage there wasn’t much study, critique, or reverence. In their place, I found an almost incandescent wall of noise.
In the first few moments, I was too involved deciphering the language of Ruc’s movements to even hear the roar. As we settled into our stances, however, into our dance of probing and retreat, that roar started to weigh on me. Sometimes I could make out individual voices hurling insults. One particular idiot, whom I would have found and killed later if I’d known what he looked like, kept screaming at Ruc to “Punch the cunt in the cunt.” I needed all my mind on the fight, on my opponent and my own body. Instead, I found my focus wobbling like a candle flame caught in a midwinter draft.
It was a good lesson. Later, after returning to Rassambur, and in future journeys out in the world, I trained to fight in just such chaos. I even spent one particularly chilly winter brawling in the Stone Pens of Erensa, and eventually I learned the skill, mastered the practice of closing off the portion of my mind that heard the noise, or that cared about it. It was not, however, a lesson that I could learn in a single night. As the fight drew on, I found myself caught in the grip of that vast fist of sound, compressed by it, until it felt as though I was battling two foes: Ruc, with his vicious punches, and the whole of Rishinira’s Rage.
It was almost inevitable, in retrospect, that he’d notice my lapses, those tiny lags between movement and response, inevitable that he would twist them to his advantage. The surprising thing was that it took so long. It wasn’t until partway through the seventh round that I misread his feint, ducked to the side, found his fist there, and felt my cheekbone break. He could have stopped there—I was already falling—but falling is not finished, and he knew enough about his business to end the job properly.
* * *
I woke to the smell of peaches, an old Ghannan melody drifting in the warm air, and a burning spike straight through my side. I forced my eyes open, but the world’s dim blur refused to resolve. I could make out the shifting glow of a lantern, a rectangular break in the darkness that might have been a window, and a shadow crossing through the greater gloom a few paces away. The singing came from the shadow. I almost recognized the voice, turned toward the figure, and then the pain in my side flared, blotting out all other thought.
When I came to again, the singing was gone, and the figure bent over me. This time I could make ou
t his face, which bled from a cut just above the eye. His nose was a bruised mess, broken recently, then carelessly reset. And those eyes—sea green in the lamplight. I remembered the eyes, but couldn’t drag a name into my memory, or any recollection of where I was.
“Drink this,” the man said.
“Who…” I croaked, the word rusty on my tongue.
“Drink this,” he said again.
I took the chipped cup. It was cool against my lips. When I’d managed three or four painful swallows, I tried again.
“Where am I?”
He smiled. It was a strangely gentle smile in that battered face. “Well, you’re not dead, despite invoking Ananshael forty or fifty times.”
Fear blazed beneath my skin. If I had revealed who I was, if I’d said anything about Rassambur, or my brothers and sisters, I’d have to kill the young man with those green eyes. I shifted on the low cot, tested a fist. The knuckles burned as I tightened them, and the bones in my hand ached, but there were other ways than punching to give a man to the god. The crockery cup was heavy enough.…
“I know how it feels to want another go at a thing,” he said, closing his hand around my wrist. “But maybe we could keep the fighting in the ring.”
And like a slap across the face, it all came back to me: Antreem’s Mass, Ruc Lan Lac, the pit, my idiotic decision to go down into that pit, the crowd’s screams, thinking I was winning, realizing I was losing, Ruc’s fist like a hammer burying itself in my side over and over.…
I studied his face in the lamplight. Some of the cuts were old, but one of his eyes still leaked blood, and there was that bruised, broken nose.
“So I hit you the one time, at least.”
Ruc raised an eyebrow. “You hit me a lot more than once.” He let go of my wrist to probe at his elbow, then his shoulder, wincing as he found the bruises. “I thought you had a knife up your sleeve after all.”
I shook my head, immediately regretted it, closed my eyes, and lay back. “Pain points,” I muttered.
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