Part 1
Chapter 1
The hourglass was already pouring when they shoved me through the gate.
It hung over the middle of the arena with nothing holding it up. Ten minutes of sand, and then somebody opens a gate and decides what happens to you.
Across the sand, Lennington's monster roared.
The sand by my toes shivered. The whole stadium stood up at once and screamed back at it, thousands of people, like it had just proposed to every one of them.
Nobody screams like that for me. I've checked.
It was big. Not big-man big. Cart-and-the-horse-pulling-it big, and every bit of it looked like it wanted me dead. I named it Tiny. Somebody had to.
I looked down at my sword.
It was a short-sword. The grip was made perfectly - for somebody else's hand, and that somebody had a very different hand from mine. The grip was too fat for my fingers to close around and too short for two hands, so I squeezed it like a rock and hoped. Too big for my hand, and still way too small for what was standing across from me.
Then I looked at the axe.
It had two heads, one on each side of the haft, and each head was wider than my chest. Somebody had worked gold into the steel in curling patterns, and somebody else had painted Duke Lennington's blue and silver on the haft in stripes. It was the stupidest weapon I had ever seen. You can't fight with a thing like that. Every swing has to come all the way around, and every miss drags you after it.
That's the point, though. Lennington doesn't keep a fighter. He keeps a show. The guards say he cuts its food if it kills too fast. I believe them, because the guards are too lazy to make things up.
Tiny roared again, lifted the axe over its head with one arm, and charged.
I'd like to say I held my ground.
It ran faster than anything that size has any right to. Each footfall threw up a spray of sand behind it, and the ground under me jumped in time with its steps, closer every time. I turned and ran. It didn't matter. I'm quick, but I was running on two skinny legs in a cell-sized body, and it was running on what looked like two tree trunks that had gotten angry.
I heard it plant its feet.
I threw myself sideways without looking. The axe came down where I'd been standing, and the sound was like a bridge breaking. A sheet of sand jumped up and slapped me across the face. My teeth hurt. Somewhere behind my ears, something rang and kept ringing.
It missed.
I got up and ran like I was on fire. Pretty much how it felt, too.
Behind me, metal scraped as Tiny wrenched the axe out of the ground. I risked a look. It had pivoted on its back foot, axe swinging flat at waist height, the gold patterns turning to a blur. I dropped onto my stomach and slid. The blade went over me with a sound like cloth tearing, and the wind of it pulled at the back of my shirt. Grit rained down on my neck.
I was up again before the axe finished its circle. Tiny stumbled after its own swing, one big foot stepping out to catch the weight.
That's the thing about the stupid axe. Every time Tiny swings it, the axe takes Tiny for a walk.
Tiny roared. The crowd roared. I didn't roar, because I was busy breathing.
Up in the stands, some man in a feathered hat kept screaming at me to fight. From up there, with a cushion under him and a sausage in his hand. Have you been there, dumbass?!
So I didn't fight. I ran left when it went right. I ran right when it went left. When it smashed, I was somewhere else. When it swiped, I was low. Once the axe came down so close that the haft clipped my shoulder and spun me round twice, and I stayed on my feet out of pure surprise. Once I tripped over my own sword and the axe went through the space where my head would have been if I'd been better at running. My sword didn't touch it once. I'm not sure it wanted to.
Up above, the gold rope of sand kept pouring.
It took Tiny three tries to work out what it should have done from the start, which was stop chasing me and start herding me. It spread its arms and the axe out wide and walked forward, slow, and every way I tried to go there was a hand or a gold blade. I gave ground one step at a time. Then my shoulder blades hit stone.
The arena wall is twice my height and smooth as a plate, and the crowd sits right on top of it. Somebody up there threw half an apple at me. It hit me in the ear.
Tiny raised the axe high over its head with both hands. Its belly was right there in front of me, wide open. A real fighter would have stabbed it.
I jumped on it instead.
I stepped onto its thigh and pushed up. My free hand caught the leather strap across its chest, and I climbed it like a ladder: thigh, strap, shoulder. Then I threw myself over its head. My knee hit its collarbone, my elbow hit its ear, and for one long, horrible moment my face was squashed against the side of its head and I could smell it, wet dog and old onions. Then I was over, sliding down its back. I bounced off the axe handle and landed on my face in the sand.
Behind me, the axe hit the wall. Stone chips spat across the arena like hail.
I spat out sand and ran.
The crowd did not love this.
At first they booed me. That part I'm used to. I'm the squishy thing that won't get squished, and nobody pays a silver to watch a squishy thing. Bits of bread came over the wall, and a sandal, and something I'm choosing to believe was a potato.
Then the booing went patchy. People were looking at each other. Somebody near the front was shouting something at Tiny, waving his arms, pointing at me like it might have lost track of where I was. It hadn't. It just kept missing.
Then the sandals started hitting Tiny instead.
You could hear the crowd turn. It was like a pot coming to the boil. The noise went from cheers to a long, rising groan, and the groan went to shouting, and the shouting had words in it now, and all the words were for the big monster who couldn't kill one skinny prisoner.
Nobody was angrier than Duke Perigren.
His box sits over the West gate, all red cloth and gold tassels, and he hadn't sat down once. He stood at the rail with both hands wrapped around it and watched me the way you watch a fly that's landed on your dinner.
I ducked another swipe. Tiny grunted with it this time. Up above, the top of the glass was nearly empty.
It was slowing down. Its chest went in and out like a blacksmith's bellows, and every breath came out with a wet whistle. The axe head dragged a long furrow behind it now. When it lifted the axe, it lifted it in stages, like a man getting a sack onto a high shelf.
I stayed just out of reach. Left. Right. Close enough that it kept trying.
I'm not brave. I just figured out that if I ran far away, it would get its breath back.
It swung. I wasn't there. It swung again, lazy, and I hopped back from it like a kid skipping rope, and the crowd screamed so loud I couldn't hear my own feet.
Above us, the last of the sand ran out.
The gold rope thinned to a thread, and the thread to a few loose grains, and then the glass was still.
Tiny stood in the middle of the arena with the axe hanging from one hand, heaving for air, and I stood ten paces off with my too-big, too-small sword, buzzing.
Up on the West side, Duke Perigren let go of the rail.
The arena has four gates. North and South hadn't opened once today. East was the one they'd shoved me through, somewhere behind me now. West was the one Perigren came through.
The West gate didn't open. It got thrown. Both doors banged back against the stone and bounced, and Duke Perigren walked through them before they'd finished shaking.
He walked in front of six guards in red coats like the arena owed him money. To be fair, I think it did.
The crowd went quiet in patches. Tiny backed off toward Lennington's side of the sand, dragging the axe, still heaving. Nobody looked at him anymore. I was a little jealous.
Up close, Perigren was tall and thin and red. Red coat, red rings, red in the face. He had amulets hanging off a chain across his chest, a dozen of them, little dark discs that clinked when he walked.
I took stock. Behind him, six guards. Behind me, a wall. In my hand, a sword that didn't fit. In my legs, nothing left at all. I've had better days. I couldn't name one right then, but I was sure I'd had them.
He stopped twenty paces from me and crooked two fingers. Come here.
I knew the rules. The sand runs out, you live. Everybody knows that. The crowd knew it, the guards knew it, I'm fairly sure Tiny knew it. The thing about rules is that Dukes are the ones who write them.
So I went. If I didn't, six red coats would walk over and carry me there instead, and my legs were shaking enough already. And a stupid little part of me thought, maybe this is fine. Ten minutes against a monster. Maybe he wants a look at me. Maybe he'll say something nice about my running skill.
It was a very small part. It was also wrong.
He walked to meet me halfway. Without looking, he held out his hand, and one of the guards put a sword in it.
It was a nice sword. Much nicer than mine.
He didn't make a speech. He didn't even look angry anymore, just tired, like this was a chore he'd put off and was finally getting around to. He stepped in, lifted the sword over his shoulder, and swung it at my neck.
This is probably going to hurt.
I didn't move. I'd like to say I was being clever. My legs just stopped listening.
The blade stopped a hand's width from my throat.
I could see my eye in the steel.
Perigren didn't move either. Blue was spreading over him, from his fingers up his wrist and over the sleeve of his coat, thin as frost on a window. It crawled up his neck and over his jaw. His mouth was still open. His eyes were still boring a hole into me.
I stood there waiting for my head to come off. It didn't. Half the crowd was pointing past me, at the East gate, so I turned around.
Two people stood in the mouth of the gate in long grey robes. Dust still hung in the air in front of them in shapes I couldn't follow. Each of them held a burned-out amulet, smoking, and was letting it crumble through their fingers like they had a hundred more at home.
They hadn't drawn that in the last five seconds. That kind of spell takes minutes. Which meant the two of them had been standing in that tunnel the whole time, drawing a spell for a Duke, just in case.
Somebody had seen this coming. That was a lot of planning for one squishy prisoner, and I didn't like it at all.
More guards came out of the East gate behind them, the serious kind, eight or ten of them in thick leather with pins on their chests. Perigren's six red coats took one look and found something interesting about their own boots.
The crowd, which had gone quiet, decided this was the best thing it had ever seen and screamed for it.
Two of the leather coats came straight for me. One had a staff, all carved bars curling around a green gem, prettier than it needed to be, and he pointed it at me without slowing down. A band of light snapped around my arms and pinned them to my sides. My sword fell in the sand. I didn't miss it.
The other one had nothing in his hands. He didn't seem to need anything.
They each took an arm and walked me toward the East gate like I'd done something wrong. Behind me, Perigren stayed exactly where he was, sword out, blue all over, swinging at a neck that wasn't there anymore.
Over my shoulder, the hourglass was already turning itself over for whoever came next.
At the gate they handed me to four more guards, big men with batons, a gem set in the end of each one, buzzing faintly like a beehive. All four batons pointed at me. Apparently it takes four grown men with magic sticks to hold one skinny kid who has never hit anybody on purpose.
I'd have been flattered if I wasn't so scared.
The one with empty hands stepped up beside me. He laid two fingers against the side of my neck.
Something black slid off them and onto my skin. It was cold, and it weighed nothing at all, which was somehow worse. It didn't push. It went in. Like cold water poured into a cup, filling me up from the bottom.
My knees went first. Then my arms, then the noise of the crowd, then the light.
The last thing I thought was: this is a really bad day.
Then I didn't think anything.
I woke up dangling. Two guards had me up by the armpits, my feet hanging over a red carpet. It was a very nice carpet.
The man in the doorway spread his arms wide, like a showman in front of a crowd that wasn't there.
"Dezt," he announced. "Dezt, Dezt, Dezt. The boy who wouldn't die." He looked me up and down, and his smile didn't move at all. "Smaller than I expected."
I'd been called worse. Never by somebody who sounded so happy about it.
He was the fanciest guy I had ever seen, and I'd just spent the afternoon looking at Perigren. In the cells they say the Warden is seven feet tall, or has no face, or hasn't slept in thirty years. Nobody ever mentioned the coat. It was white and enormous and fluffy, like somebody had skinned a cloud and taught it to sit on a man's shoulders. It ran all the way down to the carpet and spread out around his feet. Every time he moved, it caught the candlelight and threw little sparks of it across the walls. Under it he wore plain black, close and simple, so nothing would steal any attention from the coat. His hair was grey, his chin was up, and he stood in his doorway like the doorway ought to be grateful.
Then I saw his hands.
Dark lines covered the backs of them and ran up under his cuffs. Vines and hooks and shapes I didn't have names for. And they moved, curling over his knuckles and sliding back again.
"Put him down," he said. "He has legs."
The guards put me down. My legs wobbled, thought about it, and held.
He clapped his hands once. "Come. Walk with me."
Then he put his hand on my shoulder.
It was an old man's hand, thin, with long fingers. It closed on me and kept closing. Something in my shoulder creaked. The lines on his knuckles crawled faster while he did it, and I couldn't stop watching them. I've been grabbed by guards my whole life. Guards grab you to move you. This was something else. This was a hand that had decided I belonged to it.
He walked me across the room.
I've lived in an alley and I've lived in a cell. This room could have swallowed both and still had space left for a horse. Gold on everything, and a carpet so thick my feet sank into it.
At the far end, two glass doors stood open onto a balcony. He walked me out through them, and his hand didn't loosen once.
Wind hit me in the face. And below us, so far below that my stomach dropped, was the arena.
From up here it looked like a sandbox. The stands were a ring of colored dots. The wall I'd been pinned against was a thin grey line. The hourglass floated in the middle, small as a thumb, full again, pouring. Two specks were on the sand now. One of them was charging. The other one was running.
I knew exactly how that felt. From up here, it looked kind of funny.
"Lovely, isn't it," the Warden said. "I never get tired of it."
I didn't say anything. His thumb dug in under my collarbone, and I decided not saying anything was working great so far.
"Duke Perigren walked onto my sand and tried to take your head off," he said. "Rude!" He laughed, one short bark with nothing funny in it. "He's downstairs now, standing in a bucket of warm water. I'm told he's starting to feel his toes again."
I hoped he could feel every single one of them.
Then he went still. His fingers stayed dug in, and he tipped his head a little to one side, like he was listening to something inside my shoulder.
"Well," he said quietly. "Aren't you interesting."
I've been called a lot of things. Interesting was new, and I didn't like how he said it.
He turned me by the shoulder, gently, like you'd turn a chair to face a window. Past the arena, past the prison walls, past a hundred thousand rooftops, the sun was going down behind green mountains.
"You're going west," he said. "To the Western Border."
Everybody in the cells knows that name. The man in the cell next to mine used to say they turn you into amulets out there. Another one swore there's a purple light that eats you if you look straight at it. A guard told me once, laughing, that the Western Border is where they send people when they want them to stop being people. He never said what that meant. Nobody comes back. That's the one thing everybody agrees on.
"Nobody lasts ten minutes against Lennington's pet, Dezt." He leaned down, close enough that I could smell flowers on him. "Not by running. Not a skinny rat with a horrible sword. There's something in you. Small, and buried very deep, and very, very rare. I felt it the moment I touched you."
The lines on his hand crawled toward my neck.
"Out west they have people who spend their whole lives getting things like that out of people like you. It takes a long time. I'm told it hurts more than anything." He swept his free arm out over the arena and the whole city past it, and the white coat swung open behind him like a sail. "And when they're done, they will press it into an amulet. The finest the Border has ever made. Kings will beg to hold it."
He let the arm drop.
"The Western Warden has already paid me for it. Generously."
The cold started in my stomach and spread out from there. My hands were shaking, and I couldn't make them stop. That afternoon Tiny's axe had missed my head by a finger, and I hadn't felt anything like this. That was over in a second. This was going to take a long time.
So the man in the cell next to mine had been right about the amulets. I'd have told him, but I wasn't going to see him again.
I don't have anything in me. I've got ten minutes of running and a very sore shoulder, and that's the whole list. I wanted to tell him he'd made a mistake.
I opened my mouth.
The hand tightened. Not a lot. Just enough that my knees thought about folding.
I closed my mouth.
"Unless you'd rather stay with me and Perigren," he added, already looking back down at the sand. He didn't wait for an answer. I don't think there had ever been one.
I watched the running speck down on the sand. It was still running. Then it wasn't.
The crowd's roar reached us late and thin.
The Warden watched it too. He didn't blink.
Then he let go of my shoulder.
The blood rushed back into my arm, hot and aching.
A servant I hadn't even noticed stepped up with a white cloth. The Warden wiped his fingers on it, one at a time, and handed it back without looking.
"Take him down," he told the guards. "Gently. He's worth a great deal more than he looks."
It was the nicest thing anybody had ever said about me.
***
The carriage hit a hole in the road, and my chain yanked tight on the bar. The pain shot straight up into the shoulder the Warden had squeezed. I bit my tongue so I wouldn't yell.
It was dark in there, and hot. The only light was sunlight coming through the cracks between the boards, thin yellow rays lying across everything. Iron cuffs held both my wrists, and their chain was locked to a metal bar bolted along the bench. Every bump threw me forward against it.
The man across from me was huge. He was shivering, his whole body shaking, his chain trembling on his own bar. Sweat ran down his face and dripped off his chin. His shirt was soaked dark. He panted with his mouth open, short and fast, and when a ray crossed his face I saw his eyes. They were black in the middle, the black eating up almost everything else.
He was shivering from the heat. I didn't know a person could do that.
Then I looked at the size of him. The wide shoulders, the hands like shovels resting on his knees. I'd spent ten minutes that morning running from that exact shape.
He was the same kind of big as Tiny.
My stomach dropped like I'd missed a step in the dark.
So I looked at the other one.
He sat at the end of my bench, chained to my bar, and he was working. He pressed his palms flat together and ground them against each other, slow and hard, the muscles in his forearms standing out like ropes. After a while a glow started between them, dull red, like a coal at the bottom of a fire. He opened his hands a crack and breathed into the gap, and the glow jumped up bright orange. Then he clapped, once, and a spray of sparks burst out of his hands and died in the air. A little tongue of fire curled up between his dark brown knuckles and licked at nothing before he pressed his palms together and started over.
Each time the sparks flew, the big man flinched and panted harder.
I didn't know what he was making. I wanted to be on the other side of the carriage when he finished.
"I'm Dezt," I said.
He looked at me for a long second. "Torvan." Then he went back to his hands.
Best friend I'd made all day, and that included the Warden.
Outside, the soldiers on the seats were talking across the roof. One was complaining about his boots. The other told him to shut up about his boots. They sounded bored.
I would have given anything to be bored.
We were going to the Western Border. I kept hearing the Warden, calm and pleased with himself. It takes a long time. I'm told it hurts more than anything.
My hands were shaking. I pressed them flat against my knees. They kept shaking.
The rays of sunlight slowly went from yellow to orange. Torvan rubbed his hands. The big man shook and panted. The wheels kept turning under us, carrying us toward the Border.