Chapter 1913: The Winter Arena

When the carriage finally crested the small hill that hid the race track from view, Micheline got her first look at the source of the otherworldly glow.

The sun had slipped behind the mountains in the west, leaving only a hint of color on the wispy clouds in the sky, but the sight before her had little need of the sun to light the way.

The race track outside Lothian City had never been a grand, permanent structure. The track hosted a single, grand tournament at the end of spring, followed by horse races in the warm, summer months. Over the past several decades, the track itself had been worn bare, as had several footpaths that led to the surrounding slopes where the common people gathered on the grass or blankets to watch an evening of excitement.

Only a few stone structures had been built to host the wealthy and well-bred, mostly supports for wooden scaffolds that were replaced each season and a platform used to present awards to victors or address the assembled audience.

But that was before. Now, the environment had been transformed in ways that Micheline had never imagined.

More than a dozen giant, twisted pillars of ice rose up from the frozen earth, standing at least a hundred feet high and tapering to points at the top. The pillars glowed with a strange iridescence of shifting colors: green, blue, and purple, sometimes vibrant and other times pale. But the pillars weren’t the only sources of light in the icy arena.

From the top of each pillar, a ribbon of shifting light streamed, each one stretching twice as long as the pillar was tall, rippling in the sky like a banner made of light.

As Micheline’s eyes followed the pillars down, she realized they were serving as more than just icy lamp posts. The pillars had been arranged into pairs and between each of them hung a curved sheet of ice, shaped like the triangular sail of a ship. The ice was thin enough that light passed through it like fine parchment, reflecting and refracting the light from the pillars and the streamers above as well as hundreds of fires below.

In several places around the dirt track, the hillside had been dug out, neatly terraced into broad, flat stair steps at least five paces from front to back and more than fifty paces long. Bonfires had been lit at regular intervals with smaller braziers filling in the space between them.

Hundreds of commoners, perhaps more than a thousand, had taken out their blankets, laying them out on a vast bed of straw that had been laid on every earthen terrace.

"What... What is all this?" Micheline asked, staring dumbstruck at the spectacle.

"In the High Fen," Ashlynn said while looking out the window and admiring Isabell and Hauke’s work. "An event like this would have been held in a grand arena near the center of High Fen City. They have giant hearths and chimneys that carry hot air under the rows of seats because the scaled clan hates going out in the cold, but not as much as the people of the High Fen hate missing their favorite champion’s battle in the arena," she said with a light laugh.

"I think Heila is popular enough that if she announced she intended to return to the arena in the dead of winter, she’d still pack at least ten thousand people into the stands," Ashlynn teased.

"Never again," Heila said, firmly shaking her head. "Ten days of fighting in the arena is enough for a lifetime. If you need to send a witch to fight in the arena again, send Ollie. Or Virve. Not me," the slightly built Willow Witch said firmly, crossing her arms under her bust and looking at Ashlynn as if she was daring her to order otherwise.

"It’s fine," Ashlynn said with an amused smile. "One Champion of the Arena is enough for our coven, unless someone gets jealous of your statues in the High Fen and wants one of their own," Ashlynn said.

"I wondered what Isabell would come up with to create an arena we could use at night and in the depths of winter," Ashlynn said, sitting back in her seat as the carriage turned off of the main road and onto a narrower, less-used dirt track that veered toward the section currently reserved for the burgeoning aristocracy of the Bloodroot Empire and those with special invitations.

"Bare ground is the worst thief of warmth," Ashlynn explained. "And the wind can be just as bad. Look at the smoke from the fires," she said, pointing out the window. "See how it isn’t caught by the wind until it’s halfway up the pillars? The sails are windbreaks to protect the bonfires and the heat around them."

"If that’s the point, then why not just put a roof over the seats?" Micheline asked. "Or walls around them?"

"You should ask Isabell," Ashlynn said. "At a guess, this is pushing the limits of Hauke’s sorcery for what he could do in the three days time they were given. Using ice to trap warmth is possible," she said, remembering the ice house that Hauke had created on the surface of a frozen lake. "But it requires ice that’s thick enough to resist melting."

"I think it’s beautiful," Maela said, leaning forward to look out the window. She was certain that some in the Church would have called it ’demon-light’ or ’witch-light,’ but sitting in a carriage with a pair of witches, one of whom was her daughter, she failed to see how that could be considered a condemnation of the wondrous spectacle before them.

Someone had painted ribbons in the sky with pure light. What could be more enchanting than that? And the sails of ice hanging from spiral masts... She had no idea why the pillars were shaped the way they were, without any spars or braces, but they were beautiful, and the entire purpose of those glittering structures was to keep people warm and let them see in the dark.

If there was wickedness or evil in any of this, Maela couldn’t see it.

"I think it’s beautiful too," Ashlynn said a few moments later when the carriage rolled to a stop. "Now, let me introduce you to the architects of tonight’s wonders," she added as she spotted two figures approaching the carriage, one of whom towered over the other.

"And then," Ashlynn added, glancing at the last, fading light of the setting sun in the west. "Then I’ll introduce you to Nyri..."