Authors: Julie Dean Smith
Athaya felt her stomach tighten as Drianna extended her hands to take the purse of gems away. She even asked for the simple clasp that bound Athaya’s hair.
My only real weapon,
Athaya thought as Drianna passed the precious pouch to Jaren.
My only real hope. Gone.
Jaren masked his emotions as best he could—to betray even a trace of despair would only embolden their enemy—but his face was bloodless. He gazed at the purse cupped in his hands as if it were her stilled heart, given to him as undeniable proof of her death.
Athaya stole a glance at Durek; he sustained an iron facade of courage for the benefit of his subjects, but like Jaren, he knew what the loss of the crystals meant.
At the Sage’s signal, Sir Couric came forward bearing a pair of slender knives on a black velvet pillow. “Couric will act as my second in the blooding. Since you are your brother’s champion, Princess, then he will act as yours.”
Without knowing exactly what he was to do, Durek took the blade the Sage’s deputy proffered. The blade trembled in his grasp; it was all he could do not to thrust it deep into the Sage’s heart, consequences be damned.
The Sage extended his palm to him. “Take care with your cut,” he advised, sensing the tenor of Durek’s thoughts. “Couric will match its depth in your sister’s tender hand.”
Struggling to keep his anger checked, Durek took the Sage’s wrist and made a shallow slice across the skin of his palm. The Sage cupped his hand so that none of the blood welling within it would be wasted on the ground. He gave a subtle nod to Couric, and Athaya winced only slightly as the man carved a narrow slit into her palm, leaving a thin trail of red liquid in the blade’s wake.
“Clear the arena.”
Couric and Durek backed away at the Sage’s command, each clutching a blade stained with the blood of his enemy. Jaren trailed them reluctantly, walking sidelong so as not to lose sight of Athaya for an instant.
The Sage approached, towering over her. “Now take my hand, Athaya Trelane, and let us bind ourselves within the arena until such time as only one of us remains.”
He gripped her hand with inhuman strength, but she fought back the urge to cry out. Hot Sarian blood mingled with her own, oozing between her fingers and trickling down the back of her hand.
“Now repeat the words of the binding:
Aut vincere aut mori.
” His eyes burned into hers as he spoke; the game was being played in earnest now.
Athaya’s throat was dry as dust. “
Aut vincere aut mori.
”
She felt subtle pressure on her chest as the arena began to take shape. Tendrils of cloud-colored fog flowed from their joined hands, rising like smoke on a windless day. When the column of mist rose to the height of the nave’s rooftop, it slowly arced back to shower down around them like a fountain, with she and the Sage the statues at the source of the water’s flow. Like traditional wards, the blood-wards appeared as a sheer white curtain, barely visible. But then the curtain grew thicker and more opaque, the fluid white membrane shot through with red veins that pulsed in time with their heartbeats. Gradually, like being spun into a spider’s meal, the wards thickened around her; the veil was going down, cutting her off from the world, and Athaya looked back just in time to see the faces of friends and enemies alike fade out of sight as if drifting away on a fog-shrouded lake.
Jaren. Durek. All of you… by God, let me see you again.
It was silent now and perfectly still; all sight and sound was absent, as if they had stepped out of the world into a place unaffected by time. It was the antithesis of the between-place of translocation—the divine realm, as she knew it now—all color and noise and vibrancy of life. This was a dead place that only the beating of their hearts sustained.
“It is just the two of us now,” the Sage murmured, drawing Athaya’s full attention to the matter at hand. They were not truly alone—outside the wards, hundreds of unseen witnesses eagerly awaited the outcome of the contest—but all Athaya could see was the Sage himself and the pulsating red-veined shell that encased their lives; a womb from which she would be born again or a cocoon from which she would never emerge.
They circled one another slowly, each assessing the other. Athaya tried not to distract herself by the obvious advantage of his physical size. This was a matter of magic alone; such things were irrelevant. Her only weapons were her spells and her only advantage the disciplines and techniques that Jaren and Hedric had painstakingly taught her.
For all our sakes,
she prayed,
let them be enough.
“Nothing is quite so sad as the sight of a lovely woman dead,” the Sage remarked with an artful sigh. “I will regret this Challenge more than the others, I think.”
He punctuated his words with a graceful arc of copper-colored fire—a spell to test the waters but not to kill. With a whisper, Athaya deftly caught the blaze between her palms and blew it out like a candle.
She let out the air trapped inside her lungs, unexpectedly relieved. Tension eased from her muscles as she readied herself to strike back. The first shot had been fired.
The Challenge was under way.
They took each other’s measure for the next quarter hour, each striking tentative blows in an effort to uncover the other’s weaknesses. Once, Athaya found herself instinctively swatting at illusory wasps buzzing before her eyes and the brief distraction was enough to open her to the sting of an invisible lash across her cheek, drawing a delicate trickle of blood.
“I could be caressing you with kisses instead of with my lash,” he observed. Athaya grimaced; he sounded like an inept bard attempting poetry. With blatant intimacy, the Sage raked his eyes down the length of her body and up again—a tactic doubtless planned to keep her angry and unfocused “Surely you would find that more pleasing?”
To his acute irritation, the Sage promptly fell victim to his own trick while he awaited her reply, though Athaya conjured honeybees instead of wasps. Now each of them sported a battle wound, a fine trail of salty red liquid dripping from each of their chins.
She lashed out next with ice:
“Glaciem suffunde corpori!”
she cried, commanding white blasts of frigid fog to stream from her fingertips like the mist from a vision sphere. In seconds, her opponent was encased in a coffin of frozen water like a beetle set in amber. But the spell gave her only the briefest of respites; a moment later, an orange pinprick of light began to glow just over the Sage’s heart, quickly blossoming over his entire body. The prison of ice melted into a harmless puddle at his feet.
“Ah, how refreshing!” he remarked, shaking droplets of water from his hair. A shiver rattled his limbs once, but he appeared otherwise unaffected by the ordeal. “Thank you, your Highness. I feel more invigorated than ever.”
A witchlight sprang to life in his hand with a sharp twist of one wrist. With a whisper, he infused the orb with hellish heat and flung it at her face. She barely called her shielding spell in time, sending the globe ricocheting away in a cloud of blue sparks; it hit the ward boundary with a hiss like hot iron in cold water and shattered into tiny fragments that drifted to the ground like cinders.
The witchlight could have wounded her badly, but Athaya was encouraged rather than rattled; she recalled something crucial in the act of repelling it. As with his spell of translocation, the Sage’s magics were frighteningly potent, yet lacked the technique that would have rendered them unbeatable. Just as pulling a thread unravels loose-woven cloth, so could she seek out and exploit the frayed edges of his spells to rob them of deadly force.
He launched another fireball at her, hoping to catch her off guard by using the same trick twice, but this time Athaya spied the flaw in the spell; the loose link in the chain of magics holding it together. The globe broke apart in midair before it reached her, showering down like fireworks. The Sage flinched at the sting of his shattered spell and then glowered darkly at her, irritated that she had countered his magic rather than simply deflecting it.
“You cannot defeat me,” he said, hoping to rob her of any pride in her accomplishment. He circled her with deliberate care, like a cat carefully studying his prey before pouncing on it. “Why do you even try? Do you wish to be a martyr? Yes, I believe you do. I’ve an idea!” he cried with a theatrical snap of his fingers. Green eyes blazed maliciously as he gestured in the general direction of Saint Adriel’s. “This fine cathedral is in urgent need of rechristening; as king, I will not tolerate it to bear the name of the man who concocted the obscenity known as absolution. Shall we rename it Saint Athaya’s after your death?” he asked, taunting her with a smile. “Would it not be a fitting memorial to you? You, who has long yearned to be Caithe’s savior and deliver her people from the ravages of false religion?”
Athaya knew his words were deliberately chosen to provoke a reaction, but could not keep the fires of rage from burning hotter in her heart.
“Shall we carve your image alongside the gargoyles over the door,” he pressed on, “or would you prefer to be immortalized in colored glass? A more fragile medium, the latter, yet far more lovely to look upon. And tell me, Princess, what would you like the pilgrims to bring to your numerous shrines? Coins? Charms, perhaps? No,” he added with a nasty little laugh, “I think you’d rather have them bring carefully prepared treatises on the ethics of magic, written in their own crabbed hand. Will you perform miracles for them if they thus solicit you? Yes, of course you will. Blessed Athaya, the patron saint of philosophers!”
Then, without a second’s pause, he shouted the words of his next command:
“Opprime nocte corpus eius!”
Instantly, in dark parody of a vision sphere, black mist flooded from his fingertips to encircle her. The sticky cloud of darkness clung to her like molasses, striking her blind and fouling her movements. The air grew thin as the shroud choked off her breath; her lungs began to scream for air, straining within her chest as if ready to explode.
The flaw!
she reminded herself, stamping down the urge to panic.
Look for the flaw!
Sightless and disoriented, Athaya staggered dangerously close to the ward boundary; an iron fist clenched her heart in warning. Although she was blind to it, she sensed the red-veined membrane of the blood-wards grow more frenzied in its pulsing to match her racing heart.
Don’t panic
, she admonished herself, cautiously easing away from the boundary.
That’s just what he wants you to do. Keep your focus.
She extended her senses into the darkness around her, seeking the fault in his spell. It was there; a pinprick of light in the stygian murk. She extended a finger and ripped open a hole in the sticky fabric, sucking in precious air. In her next breath, she commanded the blackness to disperse. It curled away from her body like smoke rising from a campfire to settle gently against the upper bounds of the arena.
The Sage tossed an idle glance at his now-ruined creation. “Scared of the dark, are you?”
Athaya was given no time to answer; she doubled over in the next instant, stunned by a stabbing pain cutting into her belly like the thrust of a cold sword. Before she could cry out, she heard the Sage murmur a second time; in brutal response, her stomach rebelled against her, spilling up what little she had managed to keep down for breakfast that morning.
“You will notice I have enough regard for your dignity not to cast any spells of incontinence,” he informed her, mockingly awaiting words of gratitude.
Athaya tasted bitter bile as she formed the words of a counterspell. She had studied the various kinds of sickness spells but never actually cast them; like the spell of compulsion that bound Nicolas, such magics were considered highly unethical to those of traditional training. Unfortunately, the Sage would not adhere to such moral guidelines; as he and Tullis had warned her, there were no rules within the blood-wards. To honor her training would be her death. The Sage was casting spells faster now and with more force; she had little choice but to lower herself to his level or take her ethics to her grave.
“
Ulceribus cutem afflige
,” she whispered. Red blotches broke out across every inch of the Sage’s skin, growing into ugly blisters filled with pus. Another murmured spell robbed the moisture from his mouth and assailed his mind with thoughts of scorching sunlight, thirst, and salt. She willed him to believe that his bones were growing hot, like glowing iron rods set in his flesh; rods that would quickly burn to ash and leave him a formless hulk of clay, helpless and all but dead.
She hurt him that time; she could see the pain in his eyes even while he struggled to hide it. Sweat covered his body in a pungent sheen, soaking his once-fine silk garments.
“This is all very amusing,” he said with greatly forced indifference. The boils on his skin popped one by one in response to his counterspell, each expelling a drop of sickly yellow liquid before vanishing. Athaya caught the subtle change in his manner; the Sage had grown tired of sparring, eager for the real contest to begin. “But we cannot be about this much longer; I have a coronation to attend.”
Athaya went down hard onto the blunt-edged cobblestones, her knees buckling under her as the world tipped to one side, the ground a carpet that had been roughly yanked from beneath her feet. Ridiculously, the first thought that entered her head was that her wedding clothes were ruined, torn and bloodied beyond repair.
Better the dress than your own skin,
she reminded herself, and blearily labored to rise.
“Athaya, are you all right?”
It was not the Sage’s voice. Sucking in a gasp of terrified disbelief, she turned her head to see Jaren kneeling beside her, reaching to help her up.
“What are you—” She waved wildly toward the boundary of the arena. “Hurry! Get out of—”
She realized her error just as the blast of raw power hit her broadside, like the ball of a mace striking square upon her temple. The next thing she knew, she was facedown on the ground, frantically gasping for breath and struggling to sustain a shielding spell against further assault. Jaren’s wraith had already vanished back to the depths of her memory whence it had been plucked and the Sage chuckled at the success of his deception as Athaya scrambled to her feet, ignoring badly scraped knees and elbows and hastily piecing together the fragments of her concentration.