Chapter 67

Chapter 67: Chapter 67

At six-thirty on Saturday morning, the mist coming off the lake was thick enough to wet the wool of our cloaks before we even reached the bottom of the dormitory stairs.

The lower combat pits didn’t have marble benches or silk awnings. They were six sunken stone rings dug into the clay near the ferry docks on the western side of the island, surrounded by simple wooden bleachers that smelled of wet pine and old sweat. Most of the upperclassmen were still asleep, saving their walk for the eight-o’clock Top Ten bouts in the main amphitheater, so only about forty first-years were huddled on the damp benches around Pit Six.

I leaned my forearms on the top wooden rail, blowing on a tin cup of black coffee I had carried out of the mess hall. Beside me, Nia had her hands tucked deep inside her sleeves to keep them warm, while Luckas was rolling his shoulders to loosen up his back. Kaelen stood one step up on the bench behind us so he could see over the crowd.

Down in the clay circle, Cadet Harlan and Clara Beck stood twenty feet apart, holding standard-issue iron shortswords—blunted at the point, though heavy enough to break a collarbone if you swung them hard.

Harlan looked miserable. His grey tunic was buttoned crookedly, as if he had dressed in the dark without lighting a lamp, and his round face was the color of sour milk. Across from him, Clara looked just as terrified, her knuckles white around the leather grip of her sword, her knees slightly knock-kneed in the damp sand.

"Ten minutes on the glass," the third-year proctor announced, turning a heavy brass hourglass on the judge’s table. "First to three clean torso strikes, a disarm, or a ring-out stays at Rank Nine-Ninety-Nine. The loser reports to the quartermaster by ten to turn in their uniform cloak and catch the noon barge. Begin."

Harlan didn’t wait. He was forty pounds heavier than Clara, and someone in his dormitory had clearly told him that his only chance was to bowl her over before his stamina gave out. He let out a shaky yell, pushed a clumsy burst of dull orange heat into his legs, and charged straight across the circle with his sword held high over his head like a woodchopper’s axe.

Clara flinched, her shoulders hunching up toward her ears as if she were about to cover her head and curl into a ball the way she had in the Kennels yesterday.

Then her eyes dropped from Harlan’s raised blade down to his heavy boots ploughing through the damp clay.

Because Harlan was leaning too far forward to build speed, his heels weren’t touching the dirt. He couldn’t change direction without tripping over his own ankles.

At the last possible second, Clara didn’t try to block his iron blade. She took one quick, shuffling step to her left, tucked her elbows against her ribs, and shoved the flat of her shortsword sideways against the outside of Harlan’s left knee as he thundered past her.

Harlan’s boot clipped his own right calf. He went down hard, skidding four feet on his stomach in the red clay, his shortsword flying out of his wet palm and sliding all the way to the base of the wooden wall.

Before he could roll over and crawl after it, Clara ran three steps, planted her boot on the flat of his dropped blade, and touched the blunt iron tip of her sword to the middle of his back.

She was breathing so hard her shoulders shook, and she looked like she was about to throw up her breakfast, but she kept the iron point steady against his wool tunic.

"Halt!" the proctor called out, raising a white flag. "Disarm and pin. Bout to Cadet Beck."

Nobody on the bleachers cheered. A few merchant-house cadets clapped politely for Clara, then stopped when they saw Harlan sitting up in the mud.

He didn’t argue with the judge or ask for a best-of-three. He just sat there on his knees for a few seconds, wiping red clay off his palms onto his trousers, then stood up and handed Clara her scabbard from the weapon rack without looking at her face.

Clara looked up toward our rail as she wiped her blade clean on a rag. When she spotted me standing between Nia and Luckas, she gave a tiny, stiff nod of thanks before hurrying out through the east tunnel.

"Well," Luckas said quietly, watching Harlan trudge out the opposite gate toward the dormitories with his shoulders slumped. "That was depressing. I think I preferred the giant crab."

"At least he goes home with all his fingers," I said, finishing the last cold swallow of my coffee and setting the tin cup on the bench post. "In the border camps, when you washed out of infantry training, they put you on the mule wagons hauling salt pork through archer country. He’ll just go back to managing his father’s grain silos."

"Still," Nia murmured, watching the empty clay circle. "Thirty days of work, and you’re on a boat before lunch." She shook herself and looked at the clock tower rising above the trees. The long bronze hand was ten minutes past seven. "Come on, Elvit. If we don’t get up to Pit One now, Master Bram is going to yell at you during the weapon inspection."

Pit One didn’t smell like wet pine. It smelled like crushed limestone, peppermint liniment, and three hundred rich teenagers wearing wool coats that had been pressed with lavender water.

The main amphitheater sat at the center of the Vanguard complex, ringed by twelve tiers of carved stone seats that were already three-quarters full by seven-forty. Because Top Ten challenges only happened once a month—and because half the upperclassmen wanted to see the border girl get her teeth knocked in by a fourth-year—even the faculty balcony had a dozen scholars sitting under the awning with mugs of hot cider.

Down in the staging tunnel beneath the western stands, Master Bram sat on an overturned nail keg with a magnifying glass held to his good eye, running his thumb along the edge of my runic bastard sword.

"You oiled the fuller with lard again, didn’t you?" Bram grumbled without looking up.

"Mutton tallow," I corrected, tightening the leather buckle on my new right gauntlet. "The kitchen boy gave me a jar on Thursday. Whale oil smells like dead fish when the blade heats up."

"Whale oil doesn’t gum up the crossguard when it drops below freezing," Bram said, handing the sword back to me hilt-first. He tapped the dark grey dwarven dagger strapped to my right thigh. "Keep that one in the sheath unless he drops his polearm. If you try parrying a six-foot halberd with a nine-inch knife, I’m taking my steel back off your corpse before the healers even get the stretcher out."

"I’ll keep that in mind," I said.

From the mouth of the tunnel, a loud roar went up from the stone tiers outside, followed by the sharp clang of the arena warden’s bronze gong. The first match on the docket—Rank Nine versus Rank Seven—had just ended. A moment later, Julian Falk walked back down the opposite tunnel, his left arm still in its linen sling, sweating heavily through his grey shirt but grinning as he wiped a shallow nick on his chin with a towel. He had kept his spot one-handed.

The warden stepped to the iron grate at the end of our tunnel, holding a brass speaking horn.

"Second bout!" the warden called out. "Cadet Titus Mercer, Fourth Year, Rank Eleven—challenging Cadet Elvit, First Year, Rank Three! Live steel rules! Yield by voice or dropped weapon! Enter the sand!"

Luckas gave my left shoulder a quick, solid pat from behind the barrier. "Remember the valves, Elvit. Don’t dump the whole furnace on the first swing."

"Watch his back foot when he shifts the pole," Kaelen added quietly from the bench. "Halberd men always step left before they hook for the ankle."

"And don’t let him ruin your cloak," Nia said, holding my folded wool mantle over her arm. "I just brushed the mud off the hem last night."

I nodded once, drew the bastard sword from the scabbard on my back, and walked out into the cold morning sun.

The floor of Pit One was sixty feet across, covered in four inches of hard-packed yellow river clay mixed with coarse sand over a base of granite flagstones. Across the circle, Titus Mercer was already standing ten paces out from the eastern gate, rolling the thick ash shaft of his halberd between his bare, calloused palms.

He wasn’t wearing a cloak or any decorative silver braids. He wore a heavy fourth-year leather brigandine reinforced with flat iron strips over his chest and shoulders, and heavy steel greaves strapped over his boots. His halberd was seven feet long, tipped with a wide, crescent-shaped axe blade on one side, a curved iron grappling hook on the other, and a four-sided armor-piercing spike at the top. The bottom three feet of the wooden shaft were reinforced with strips of black iron nailed into the grain so a sword couldn’t chop the wood in half.

Up in the crimson-draped box reserved for the Student Council, Aurio Gentrimio leaned on the stone parapet beside Seraphina Vorne. Neither of them clapped as I walked out; they just watched closely, Seraphina resting her chin on her gloved knuckles.

The arena warden—a scarred former captain of the 2nd Heavy Infantry—walked to the edge of the clay circle and raised a red linen flag between us.

"Blades inspected! Healers standing by on the north wall!" the warden shouted. "No strikes after a spoken yield! Fight!"

He whipped the red flag down.

Mercer didn’t charge. A man carrying a seven-foot polearm never rushes a shorter opponent with a sword unless he’s an idiot, and Mercer had survived four years in the top twenty.

Instead, he took one short, heavy step forward and slammed the iron-shod butt of his halberd three inches deep into the packed yellow clay.

A dull, heavy thrum vibrated through the soles of my boots.

Mercer’s Ember wasn’t hot like Luckas’s, and it wasn’t cold like Gael’s. It felt heavy and dry, like standing inside a stone quarry when the blasting charges go off. A ring of brownish-amber light pulsed down his bare forearms, straight through the ash wood of his weapon, and into the ground.

Crack.

With a noise like splitting timber, three jagged trenches—each two feet wide and knee-deep—ripped across the packed clay floor directly between us, throwing up ridges of loose gravel and broken granite slabs. Within two seconds, the flat arena floor around my boots had been turned into a broken staircase of tilted stone and ankle-breaking ruts.

Up in the bleachers, several first-years gasped.

"Come on, then, Lieutenant!" Mercer called out, lifting his halberd into a wide, low guard across his chest, his feet planted solidly on the only flat patch of clay left in the center of the ring. "Let’s see that vanguard sprint everyone talks about!"

He was smart. He had watched my earlier bouts from the balcony. Against Corin and Gael, I had won in three seconds by closing the gap in a straight line before they could finish their first swing. By tearing up the footing across the middle of the pit, he had taken away my straight-line speed; if I tried to sprint across those knee-deep ruts at full tilt, I’d either snap an ankle or have to look down at my feet to jump, giving him a free swing at my head with seven feet of reach while I was in the air.

I didn’t sprint.

I rested the flat of my bastard sword against my right shoulder, looked down at the broken clay trenches, and took a slow, normal breath.

In the 7th Legion, we never fought on flat sand anyway. The only time the ground was flat on the southern border was when it was frozen in January.

I stepped into the first trench, keeping my knees bent and my weight low over my heels, walking across the tilted granite slabs at a steady, unhurried pace.

Mercer’s eyes narrowed slightly. When I came within ten feet of his flat island of clay, he didn’t wait for me to climb out of the second rut. He lunged forward, driving the four-sided top spike of his halberd straight at my breastbone like a lance, his heavy shoulders putting three hundred pounds of earth-augmented weight behind the point.

I didn’t activate the Rune of Antiquity. I could see the line of his shoulders clearly enough with my own two eyes.

I pivoted forty degrees to my left on the sloped slab, letting the iron spike hiss past my ribs, and swung my bastard sword down at the wooden shaft behind the axe head to pin his weapon into the dirt.

Mercer was ready for it. Before my blade hit the wood, he twisted his wrists and yanked the halberd backward, catching my crossguard with the curved iron hook on the back of his axe blade.

With a sharp clang of steel on iron, he wrenched sideways, using the long lever of his seven-foot shaft to pull me off balance toward the lip of the trench while his left boot stamped down on the clay.

A slab of buried flagstone right behind my right heel suddenly jackknifed upward out of the dirt, meant to trip me backward onto my spine so he could bring the axe edge down on my collarbone.

That was when I let the cold light into my right eye.

Just for half a heartbeat. Just enough for the rune under my sleeve to map the angle of the rising stone behind my boot.

Instead of fighting his hook or stepping back into the trap, I let go of my sword’s pommel with my left hand and stepped up onto the rising granite slab as it tilted out of the clay, using the lifting stone itself as a stepping block to launch myself forward inside the reach of his long shaft.

Mercer grunted in surprise as I came flying out of the dust cloud three feet from his face rather than falling backward.

He didn’t panic. He let go of the rear end of his halberd shaft with his right hand, choked up on the iron-reinforced middle section, and drove the heavy steel cross-shaft straight toward my teeth like a battering ram to knock me back into the ditch.

I raised my left forearm to take the iron bar across my leather bracer.

The impact rattled my back teeth and bruised the bone of my forearm right through the boiled leather, shoving me half a step back, while the edge of his iron axe flange scraped across my left cheek just below the cheekbone, drawing a hot, thin line of blood.

In the stands, the fourth-years roared, thinking he had pushed me back into his striking range.

They didn’t see what I did with my right hand while our arms were locked together in the bind.

I didn’t dump my whole core into the runes on my sword the way I had against the Republic commandos. If I had, the excess lightning would have arced down the iron strips of his halberd straight into the ground where his boots were anchored.

Instead, as my blade pressed tightly against the iron side-straps of his weapon four inches above his choked-up right fist, I pictured Luckas’s tallow candle in the dark courtyard.

Shoulder. Elbow. Wrist.

I held ninety percent of the heat locked behind my collarbone, let a thin, compressed thread of energy slip past my elbow, and released a single, needle-sharp pulse of blue static directly through the flat of my sword into the iron strap under Mercer’s bare right thumb.

It wasn’t enough lightning to stop his heart or burn his skin black. It weren’t even loud—just a sharp snap like breaking a dry walnut shell.

Every nerve in Mercer’s right forearm spasmed violently as the localized current hit the wet sweat on his palm. His fingers popped open against his will, his right hand flying off the shaft as if he had grabbed a red-hot stove poker.

For one-third of a second, the heavy seven-foot halberd was supported only by his left hand at the front collar. The heavy axe head dipped four inches toward the dirt.

That was all the room I needed.

I didn’t step back to swing. I slid my left hand back onto the pommel of my bastard sword, opened the mental gate in my chest all the way, and drove the full, unthrottled weight of my Swelled Bud shoulders into a short, chopping downward cut aimed two feet below his left fist—right where the black iron reinforcing strips ended and the bare ash wood began.

The blue runes along the fuller flared bright enough to cast shadows in the morning sun.

CRACK.

My heavy steel blade sheared cleanly through two inches of seasoned ash wood on a diagonal slant. The heavy iron halberd head dropped into the loose clay with a dull thud, leaving Mercer holding four feet of splintered wooden stick in his numbed hands.

Before he could drop the broken stick and reach for the shortsword at his belt, I dropped my shoulder into his iron-plated chest, driving him two steps back until his heels hit the edge of his own trench, while my left hand drew Master Bram’s grey dwarven dagger from my thigh sheath.

I stopped the flat dark point of the nine-inch blade half an inch below his chin, right in the soft gap above his leather gorget.

Mercer froze.

His chest heaved under his brigandine, his breath coming in loud, gravelly gusts that blew tiny droplets of sweat off his chin onto my leather gauntlet. His right hand was still twitching at his side from the nerve shock, the fingers curling and uncurling slowly.

For three seconds, the entire amphitheater was quiet enough that I could hear the wind flapping the canvas awning over the faculty box.

Mercer looked down past his nose at the ugly grey dwarven steel touching his throat, then up at the line of blood trickling down my left cheek.

Slowly, deliberately, he opened his left hand and let the broken wooden shaft fall into the clay.

"Yield," Mercer said, loud enough for the warden to hear.

I pulled the dagger back immediately, sliding it into the sheath on my thigh with a sharp snick, and lowered my bastard sword to my side.

"Halt!" the warden shouted, raising his white flag toward the judges’ box. "Bout concluded! Cadet Elvit retains Rank Three!"

Up in the first-year section, Nia let out an ear-splitting whistle through two fingers while Luckas banged the pommel of his sword against the wooden railing loud enough to rattle the boards. Up in the Student Council box, Aurio Gentrimio clapped his hands together slowly, leaning over to say something to Seraphina, who simply nodded once and went back to sipping her cider.

I reached down with my left hand, picked up the severed iron head of Mercer’s halberd out of the dirt, and held it out to him butt-first so he wouldn’t have to bend over in front of the whole school to pick up his broken weapon.

Mercer stared at the axe head for a second, then took it with his left hand, his right fingers still too stiff to close properly.

"What did you just do to my thumb?" he asked quietly, flexing his red palm as the arena boys ran out with rakes to level the clay trenches for the next match. "That wasn’t a full discharge. My uncle fought a sky-rune knight in the Western Marches—when those blades spark, they throw you ten feet."

"If I threw you ten feet, you would’ve rolled out of reach and drawn your sidearm," I said, wiping the blood off my cheekbone with the back of my sleeve. "A small spark just locks the tendons."

Mercer looked at the clean diagonal cut through the two-inch ash shaft in his hand, then back at me. A slow, wry grin tugged at the corner of his mouth. "My house tutor told me you didn’t have any formal control. Said you were just a heavy swinger from the border camps."

"I had a good tutor this week," I said, glancing up toward the tunnel rail where Luckas was grinning like an idiot.

"Tell your tutor he just cost me three vials of crown minerals," Mercer grunted. He tapped the flat of his broken halberd head lightly against my shoulder guard—the vanguard gesture for a clean bout—and walked back toward the eastern gate to have the healers check his wrist.

When I walked back into the western tunnel, a junior clerk from the Bursar’s office was already waiting beside Master Bram’s nail keg, holding a small velvet-lined cedar box sealed with the Academy’s silver stamp.

"Cadet Elvit," the clerk said briskly, holding out a brass stylus and an ivory tablet. "Sign on the third line to confirm retention of Rank Three for the October cycle. Your monthly resource allocation is inside."

I scratched my signature onto the wax tablet and took the cedar box while Nia threw my grey wool cloak back over my shoulders.

"Let me see that," Luckas said as the four of us walked out of the tunnel into the sunny courtyard behind the pits, where the sweet smell of fried dough and sausages was drifting over from the Saturday breakfast carts.

I flipped the small brass hook on the cedar box and lifted the lid.

Nestled in padded slots of grey wool were three thick crystal vials, each the size of a shotgun shell, filled with fine, glittering grains of deep red mineral sand that felt faintly warm even through the glass—refined ember-quartz from the royal mines in the southern mountains. A single vial on the capital black market cost more than a warhorse; swallowing one during deep meditation could shave two months off the time it took to widen your internal core for the Bud Burst.

"Pretty," Nia whistled softly, peering over my arm as we walked. "My brother had to save his garrison pay for a whole year just to buy half a vial of the low-grade yellow stuff."

"And I kept mine by default since nobody from the top ten challenged me this morning," Luckas said, patting his own coat pocket where a matching cedar box sat. He looked sideways at me, squinting at my face in the sunlight. "Hold still a second. Mercer clipped you."

I stopped by the stone horse trough near the courtyard arch while Nia pulled a clean linen handkerchief out of her satchel, dipped a corner in the cold spring water, and dabbed at the scrape under my left eye. It stung briefly, then went numb in the cold air.

"It’s just a scratch from the flange," I said, pulling my head back after two seconds. "It stopped bleeding already."

"If you get another scar on your face, the third-years are going to stop sitting within three tables of us at lunch," Nia said, tucking the damp cloth away. "Right now we at least get the bread basket passed to us occasionally."

I looked down into the open cedar box in my hands, counting the three red crystal vials, then looked at Kaelen and Nia.

Luckas had his own Rank Four stipend box in his pocket. Kaelen was ranked ninth among the first-years, which put him at Rank Thirty-Four overall—high enough to get free access to the apothecary libraries and second-tier blades, but twenty-four spots shy of the Top Ten mineral cutoff. And Nia sat comfortably at Rank Two-Hundred and Twelve, safely away from the monthly purge docks, though nowhere near the crown vaults.

I pulled two of the red vials out of the wool slots, closed the cedar box with the last one still inside, and held one vial out to Kaelen and the other to Nia.

Both of them stopped walking and stared at my hand as if I were holding a live scorpion.

"Are you out of your mind?" Nia whispered, glancing around the courtyard to make sure no proctors were watching. "Elvit, those are Grade-A crown minerals! Commander Erula sent you here to reach the Bud Burst as fast as possible!"

"And you can’t absorb more than one vial every three weeks without giving yourself ash-fever in your lungs," I replied calmly, keeping my hand extended. "Seraphina had her medical folio open to the mineral toxicity Chapter on Wednesday night. I read the page upside down while we were talking. The upperclassmen only hoard all three vials so they can trade the extras to their cousins or sell them to the alchemists."

"Wait—you read a medical textbook upside down?" Luckas asked, blinking.

"I was bored while Aurio was talking about his chess game," I said. I pushed the two glass tubes into Nia’s and Kaelen’s palms and closed their fingers over them. "We’re Squad Seven. If we have to go back into the cellars—or if Toris drops us into the Bramble against the third-years next month—I can’t have my scout running out of breath or my flank guard swinging slow. Take them."

Kaelen looked down at the warm red crystal in his pale palm. For a second, his unreadable assassin’s mask slipped, and he looked like a normal seventeen-year-old boy who wasn’t used to anyone giving him anything that didn’t come with a contract attached.

He slipped the vial into the inner pocket of his black tunic without a word, then reached into his satchel, pulled out a warm, grease-spotted paper bag he had bought from the cart while I was in the tunnel, and handed it to me.

"Sausage roll," Kaelen said flatly. "With mustard. I got it before the fourth-years bought them all."

Nia laughed, wiping the corner of her eye quickly with her thumb before tucking her vial safely into her belt pouch. "All right, Lieutenant. Next week in Geography, I’m drawing all your coastlines for you. Potato peninsulas and all."

"Please don’t," I said, opening the paper bag and taking a bite of the hot, peppery sausage as the ten-o’clock bell began to ring from the high spires, calling the citadel to weekend liberty. "I actually want to pass this term.