The pressure grew. Selena fought to free her arms, but his grip was tight, and the few punches it allowed were powerless. Black spots bubbled along the fringes of her vision. A few more seconds and they would narrow to pinpricks. Her ears rang with a high and howling wind. With a desperate lurch, she worked her forearms up and clawed at his face. Her opponent laughed, kissing at her scrabbling fingers. He said something taunting in Mejise. Finally, she seized his beard. A firm tug assessed her grip and found it sufficient. He snarled at the discomfort but continued his squeezing assault.
With a final tweak to her grip, Selena hurled her face forward. Her forehead struck his nose. A brittle snap filled the Iron Circle. She smashed her forehead into him again and again. Blood and mucus flecked her face, running along the rivulets of sweat that lined her cheeks, fluids mingling in the horrible intimacy of fighting at its most vicious.
She delivered a final slam and released him. His knees buckled like hinges with the pins pulled free, spilling him onto the dusty ground. He lay there for a moment, blood dribbling from the shard of red meat his nose had become and congealing into mucusy curds about his beard.
Selena hedged back, fists raised. This wasn’t an official fight, which meant there was no way to say exactly when it ended. She watched the man arch his back, his eyes narrow to slits, and his mouth part to emit a huge and bellowing laugh. He kicked his heels and pounded the dirt with his fists, cackling hysterics into the open air. A confused murmur drifted through the crowd.
The man raised himself to his feet and tottered over to Selena, his gait still a bit unsteady—or so it appeared. Selena had used the same type of feint on many occasions and did not drop her guard. He held his palms out in a supplicating gesture. Selena studied him wearily.
They remained that way for a moment, neither moving, until the man’s hand snapped out and grabbed Selena by the wrist. She yanked her arm back but was unable to break his grip. In a single fluid motion, he held her arm aloft and pivoted to stand beside her, the two of them facing the crowd. He shook her fist as if waving a trophy and motioned to her with his free hand, imploring the crowd to acknowledge her.
Cheers buried the Iron Circle in a rockslide of sound. Selena glanced warily at her opponent, who met her gaze with a flash of his large and red-flecked teeth. His nose had swollen into a hideous tuber bulging from the scraggly thicket of his beard. She half expected him to try and sweep her arm back in some petulant, elbow-shattering bit of revenge, but he simply let her hand drop and disappeared back the way he’d come. Selena soaked up her applause for another moment and, afraid to overstay her welcome, slipped out of the ring and into the underpass where some of Mr. Todd’s other girls had watched the proceedings.
None of them spoke. They stared at Selena, their faces windswept and alien. Selena turned to Mary Katherine. “That went pretty well, I guess.”
“Pretty well? That was Paulo Aguilar! He’s a Brother of the fucking Iron Circle!” Mary’s excitement abated. She chewed the corner of her mouth. “Uh, did Mr. Todd tell you to call him out like that?”
“No. Why?”
Mary said nothing. She looked away, fingers smoothing out stray strands of hair. The other girls did likewise. Only one continued meeting her eyes: Grace Delgado, her head tilted slightly on her long regal neck. Selena stared back, projecting neither hostility nor friendliness. After a few seconds’ pause, Grace gave a small nod and walked away down the corridor.
A familiar hand closed around her bicep. Trejo’s breath hissed hot and sour in her ear.
“With me.”
“You could just ask, you know,” Selena said. Trejo didn’t’ listen. He was off, dragging her behind him like a disobedient child. The last time he did this it had infuriated her, but for some reason. his silent fury struck a comic note in her this time, and she had to bite her lip to restrain a peal of giggles. What the hell is wrong with me? There’s nothing funny here. And yet the laughter built in her belly. She felt overcome by the giddy fatalism of an explorer who, having cast ashore on an uncharted beach, set her ships alight behind her, resolved to live or die in the new world.
After a short jaunt in a carriage chilly with Trejo’s bitter silence, Selena found herself marched up the stairs of Todd’s hacienda and set down in a chair opposite him. The glib, slightly patronizing bonhomie of her first visit was nowhere in evidence. Trejo bowed stiffly and left. Todd ignored him, his glare locked squarely on Selena.
“I’ve just had a most interesting conversation with my messengers regarding your little performance this afternoon. The last time we spoke, I’d had it in my mind that you and I’d reached an understanding. It seems I was wrong.”
“Looks like it,” agreed Selena, picking at a loose thread in the arm of her chair.
Todd pinched the bridge of his nose. “Then let’s be clearer, shall we? I told you I didn’t want you to fight in the Iron Circle. And the first time you get in the Circle, what did you do?”
“Why was I there, if not to fight?”
“The same reason many of my girls step into that ring. To put on a show. Which you did in the most half-assed way possible. Then, for an encore no one asked for, you went and challenged a Brother of the Iron Circle to a fistfight.”
“Challenged and won,” Selena clarified.
Todd chuckled. “You’re amused. I’m glad. We’ll see how funny you think it is when one of the pit boys gets you pinned. And it’ll happen. I don’t care how fast you were in that Circle. No one’s fast forever.”
Selena cocked an eyebrow. “You’re saying I can fight again?”
“Can? Try will. You’re an upstart young girl who, unprompted, bested one of the greatest fighters in the most elite segment of the entire Iron Circle. The crowd won’t accept anything less, and I can’t find it in myself to care about your well-being any longer. I’ve rescinded my protection. You’re still my marcada, but the beasts of the Circle can do what they want with you. It’s all one to me.”
They sat in silence for a moment, Selena unsure what to say next and Todd clearly uninterested in saying anything at all. He sipped morosely at clear liquid in a fluted glass and stared into the unlit hearth.
“I guess I should say thanks.”
Todd laughed, a single ashen cough of humorless noise. “I’d tell you to hold your thanks for a couple of weeks if I even wanted them in the first place. Which I don’t. We’ll see how happy you find this new arrangement once word gets out. You think there’s chivalry among the Hermanos? If so, you’re in for a very rude awakening.”
“Okay.”
Todd shook his head. He seemed disgusted at his own amusement. “Get the hell out of my house, already. In every sense but your branded fealty, we’re done.”
Selena blinked into the sunlight. An otherworldly haze hung about her head, the fogginess one gets in dreams when the where and the why of things grows soft and tenuous, its edges smudging the more you touch them. She’d answered Todd’s summons with an air of resigned fatalism, unsure what awaited her once she left his manor the second time—prison? An auction block? The gallows? Instead, he’d given her the one thing she’d asked for and been denied, the very object she stole from under his nose and was supposed to be punished for. She didn’t even need to vacate her bunk! He said he’d rescinded his protection, but when in her life had she ever had any protection before? The events spun in her mind like a wheel on a broken axle, all jolts and wobbles and doubling back, drilling through her with its pervasive dizziness.
“Well, what the hell do I do now?” she asked aloud. The opportunity to even ask the question had been so unexpected, that the answer took a full second to arrive, as obvious as it was.
She would fight, of course.
21: Fools and Kings
Marcus was running out of places to drink.
It wasn’t for a lack of money, though he had none: his reputation was known and respected through most of Juarez’s assorted watering holes, and he could
always eke out credit when needed. Nor had he been officially kicked out of anywhere—as if any right-thinking barkeep would dare. Rather, he abandoned them, drifting to the next friendly stool once the discomfort his presence caused his current bar’s owners grew too obvious to ignore.
This discomfort was never consciously addressed, but Marcus lived and died by his ability to winkle out the innermost thoughts and intentions of those around him, and it never took long for him to pick up on them. Bartenders nodded too eagerly, their faces rigid with pasteboard smiles, and scrubbed compulsively at glasses that were clean five minutes ago. Patrons barked overfriendly greetings before disappearing to the far corners of the room. Tension buzzed in the background of every moment, a subconscious chord endlessly swelling in volume.
Marcus never had to ask if someone knew his current situation: it was clear everybody already did. Whether leaked from an observer or spread by Thorin himself, all of Juarez knew that Marcus was due to fight for the Jefe in the Iron Circle and that he’d thus far refused to do so.
His refusal was unspoken but potent. Each morning, when Thorin’s porter called on him to attend his fight, he brushed past him and went somewhere to drink instead. It was the same story every day, without the slightest variation in the porter’s tone of voice, or the benign expectation of Marcus’s acquiescence. The porter—thin, young, his bronze-hued face shaved bald and emblazoned with green stars at either temple—displayed no anger or surprise at being so consistently ignored.
As a strategy, this was unsustainable. Any amusement Thorin found in Marcus’s gall would sour into anger soon enough, and blood would follow—at least some of it Marcus’s. Yet Marcus couldn’t quite bring himself to care. Everything he’d felt since returning to Juarez—the anguish at Thorin’s ascent to de facto emperor, the rage at his own impotence in the face of such a regime, the guilt at how the stains of his past had tainted those around him—lay buried beneath a rockslide of apathy. Let them come for him. Let them kill him, for that matter. He just planned to get his money’s worth out of his liver before they did. This remained his sole objective: the overtaxing of an internal organ. As a raison d’être, it wasn’t much, but you played the hand life dealt you. Only fools and kings believed they could slip in a phony card and not get caught out over it.
So, the porter kept coming, and Marcus kept ignoring him. The pattern of visits changed only once, when Manuel arrived in the porter’s stead.
Marcus had made no effort to ingratiate himself directly with any of the Senadors. Tensions between the three had always been high, long before Thorin had planted the first seeds of his eventual coup, and forming alliances with one inevitably meant making adversaries of the other two—a losing proposition, overall. But while sycophancy wasn’t his style, he did make a point to stay friendly with key figures in their pandillas. Sometimes these relationships were tedious affairs, the men in question arrogant bores turgid with self-importance, viewing anyone not of their rank and affiliation with varying levels of suspicion and disdain.
Manuel was a different case. A teniente in the pandilla controlled by Senador Delgado—himself the most pleasant of the city’s three rulers—Manuel never lost the easy bearing of an unranked blanco. He’d respected Marcus without fearing him, which made their interactions loose and unrestrained in a way they seldom were for a man of Marcus’s reputation. If Thorin had tried, he could scarcely have chosen an advocate more likely to persuade Marcus without rankling his pride—a fact that made Marcus suspect Manuel had come of his own volition, or perhaps even against Thorin’s wishes.
“You need to stop this foolishness, ese,” Manuel said. His smile, once as constant a staple of his face as the mole on his chin, was nowhere to be seen.
“There was a time when your idea of foolishness would be to greet Thorin with anything but a mouthful of spit. What happened, Manny?”
“Thorin’s coup happened. You weren’t here to see it. He’s a coward in some ways, but crafty and willing to gamble. Delgado and Evangelista had forgotten this. They saw him as the blowhard, the jester, the bent prong of their trident, while he mustered just enough force to depose them. They were atop the gallows with their hands bound before they’d even fully realized he’d struck. There was resistance, but he tamped it down. Those who fought back died awful deaths. I saw a man live for two days without a strip of skin on his body, warmed by flames to keep hypothermia from ending his misery. I saw eyes gouged out, limbs severed and sutured back where they didn’t belong. We saw it all—were made to see it all, so when Thorin called to us, the torturadores to his left and the tatuadores to his right, we all knew which one to choose.”
“A sad story, Manuel. I’m sorry for what’s happened to you. But never have I bowed to a tirano. I refused when there were three of them, and I refuse now there is only one.”
Manuel grabbed Marcus by the shoulders and shook him. Few men outside his family would dare perform such a gesture. “You’re still acting like la paz inquieta is there to protect you. But it’s gone. The old rules have been erased, Marcito. Thorin rewrote them. And that means he wins every time. You’re right that he wants you to fight under his banner—your name carries far in these parts, and it would be an honor for him. But you’re not indispensable, and there are no other Senadores left to give you quarter.”
“I ask for no quarter. If Thorin wants me so badly, let him come to me himself. I tried to pay my debt through envoys, and he denied me. Now he sends envoys on his behalf, and I give him the same treatment.”
Manuel shook his head. “I pray for you, ese.”
“My hand has never needed prayers to give it speed, Manuel, but thank you.”
“I’m not praying for your victory in combat, Marcus. That would be a waste of time. I’m praying for you to see reason.”
That had been yesterday. This morning the porter had been back, once more subject to Marcus’s rebuff. With the return to routine, Marcus could almost convince himself that things wouldn’t escalate. Thorin would continue to send the porter on his quixotic quest—perhaps as an inventive sort of punishment for a past slight—and Marcus would whittle away his days in penury.
But Manuel’s plea continued to echo in the backmost chambers of his mind, and it was thus no real surprise when two men with pistols on their hips strode into the room and loomed over Marcus’s table, their faces so composed and stoic they seemed scarcely human, pareidolic illusions glimpsed in chunks of stone.
The surprise came from the man who stepped in after them.
Thorin moved with a kingly swagger cribbed from some second-rate pantomime, shoulders swiveling with each outsized step. He took his position between his guards.
Only two, Marcus mused. There was a time he wouldn’t have come for me with less than a dozen men at his side. Has my shadow truly grown so small?
Thorin rapped his knuckles on the table in front of Marcus. His rings struck the wood with a bracing clack, catching the attention of the few remaining patrons too inebriated to notice his presence beforehand. Those with less sodden faculties had already skirted to the nearest exit, or else tucked themselves into their drinks in an effort to be overlooked.
“You’ve been ignoring my summons, Marcus,” Thorin said. “This is not appreciated.”
Marcus shrugged. “I’ve been busy.”
“I can see that.”
He took the bottle from Marcus’s table and held its neck between two fingers. It swung back and forth, the dregs of cloudy amber liquid swirling in its belly. He took a sniff of it and recoiled.
“Peh! What is this horse urine?”
He turned toward the bar and hollered at the bartender, whose bald head shrank into his hunched shoulders.
“You call this mescal? I’ve pissed finer drinks than this!”
The bartender nodded with a small tittering laugh and continued polishing the countertop with a rag.
Thorin took a swing and grimaced. “You debase yourself with this swi
ll, Marcus. Why not allow yourself something finer?”
“Fine things are not without cost, Jefe.”
“There is no need for this self-inflicted poverty. You are the best fighter the Iron Circle ever saw. We do not let our warriors go unrewarded.”
Thorin put a hand on Marcus’s shoulder and squeezed. Marcus suppressed a shudder of revulsion. He longed to brush the odious hand away, but restrained himself. It was a fine line he was walking—and given how little mescal remained in the bottle Thorin held, Marcus doubted his capacity to walk anywhere. He chose his words delicately.
“It seems to me, I can expect no reward no matter what path I may choose. I attempted to pay my debts to you in good faith, but this attempt was rejected. I am yours forever perhaps, but that doesn’t mean you’ll find me worth having.”
“That is most unfair, Marcus. I have never been known to leave my debtors without their spending money. As Jefe, I take care of all my citizens. Does your mother not enjoy the charity of the Grey Sisters? These women practice their art at my pleasure. They could easily be stopped.”
Marcus chose not to respond to this threat. He studied the table before him, losing himself in the whorls and eddies of its grain.
Thorin was a man who’d grown used to having his questions answered. He frowned. “I will ask one more time. There is a match awaiting you in the Iron Circle. Will you attend it?”
Iron Circle Page 13