The Solis Binding: The Umbra Trials

Copper lanterns swung from iron chains above the assembly yard, their flames bending in the wind that came down off the Spire. The Mysterious Cloaked Figure stood at the edge of the gathered students, hood low, breath quiet beneath the wool. Frost glittered on the flagstones where morning had not yet reached, and the air carried the bitter green scent of crushed rue from the wardens' satchels.

A drumbeat sounded. Then another. Then silence so complete that the wind seemed louder for it.

King Vorr ascended the dais alone. No heralds preceded him. No Chancellor walked at his shoulder. The crown he wore was the simple iron band of his forebears, unpolished, deliberate. He looked out across the rows of Umbra students in their slate-grey cloaks and across the Solis contingent in their white-and-gold, and his gaze settled somewhere past both, as though he spoke to the stones themselves.

"You know why you are here," he said. His voice carried without effort, the kind of trained projection that made a man sound as though he stood beside every listener at once. "You have heard the rumours in the halls. You have seen the lists posted on the dormitory doors. I will not insult you with denial."

A murmur moved through the yard like water finding cracks in ice. The Mysterious Cloaked Figure did not move. Beside them, a gloved hand found the crook of their elbow and squeezed once, brief and steadying. Silver-Eyed Girl stood close enough that her hood brushed the edge of the Cloaked Figure's shoulder. She did not look at the King. She watched the Solis ranks instead, where a young man in lieutenant's braid stood with his arms folded, smiling as though he had been promised a gift.

"The Umbra Trials will commence at sundown on the seventh day from this one," King Vorr continued. "Umbra students will face Solis champions in single contest, by lot, until one from each faction remains standing. The victor of each contest will be granted audience with the Chancellor."

He paused. The wind answered for him.

"And the victor of the final contest will be granted a wish. From the Chancellor himself. Whatever the victor asks, within the bounds of the Binding and the laws of the realm."

The sound that came from the Umbra ranks was not a cheer. It was something rawer. Somewhere near the front a girl laughed, high and startled, the way a person laughs when they have been struck and have not yet decided whether to fall. The Mysterious Cloaked Figure felt the word settle into the bones of the chest: wish. Such a small word for so much weight. They had heard it before. Their parents had heard it before. In the marshlands, in the year the Binding was first sealed, the word had meant something else entirely.

A boy shouldered through the crowd two rows ahead. Wren Ashfield, ash-blond and sharp-featured, his Umbra cloak thrown back as though it offended him. He turned in a half-circle, scanning faces, and when his gaze found the Mysterious Cloaked Figure he raised one hand, fingers spread, then dropped it again. The gesture meant nothing. It also meant everything.

King Vorr waited for the sound to die. It did not, not fully. He waited anyway.

"I will not pretend this is a fair contest," he said. "It has never been a fair contest. The Umbra students enter this academy on sufferance. The Solis students enter it by inheritance. You will be matched by lot against opponents who have trained their whole lives for this single purpose. Some of you will be hurt. Some of you may not survive the week."

The silence this time was different. It was the silence of a held breath.

"And yet I am told that every year, without exception, the Umbra students who are called rise to their feet and answer. I am told this because I have seen it. I am telling you now because I wish for once to see it from this side of the dais."

He stepped back. The iron crown caught the lantern light and threw it back, fractured. Then he was gone, and the yard erupted.

The Mysterious Cloaked Figure did not move at once. The crowd surged, split into eddies and currents, Umbra students pressing together in tight knots while Solis champions peeled away in ones and twos, speaking low among themselves. Silver-Eyed Girl's hand had not left the Mysterious Cloaked Figure's elbow. When she finally spoke, her voice was very quiet beneath the noise.

"You don't have to enter."

"I know."

"You could stay in the tower. Master Aldric would never ask it of you."

"Master Aldric is not the one asking."

Silver-Eyed Girl's grip tightened, then released. She drew her hood lower and turned her face away. The lanterns above had steadied now, the wind dropping as the sun crept above the Spire's eastern shoulder. Across the yard, Dorian Ashworth leaned against a stone buttress with the ease of a man who had been born leaning against things. He was watching. He was almost always watching.

A Solis lieutenant approached him, hands clasped behind his back, and murmured something that made Dorian's mouth twist. Dorian answered in the same low register, and the lieutenant laughed, brief and professional, and moved on. Dorian's gaze drifted across the yard and found the Mysterious Cloaked Figure. He raised two fingers to his temple in a salute that was not quite a salute, then pushed off the buttress and disappeared into the Solis ranks.

"He knows something," Silver-Eyed Girl said.

"He always knows something," the Mysterious Cloaked Figure answered. "It is his only reliable currency."

Wren Ashfield had fought his way back through the crowd by then, his cloak streaming behind him, cheeks flushed. He stopped in front of them both, breathing hard, and said, "Seven days. Seven days is nothing. I have trained for worse than this."

"You have trained for nothing," Silver-Eyed Girl said, not unkindly. "You have read about training."

"It is the same thing, in spirit."

"It is not the same thing in any sense that matters."

Wren ignored this, which was his custom. He turned to the Mysterious Cloaked Figure, and the brightness in his face dimmed by a fraction. "You will enter," he said. It was not a question.

The Mysterious Cloaked Figure looked past him, across the yard, to where the great bronze doors of the academy hall stood closed. Beyond them, somewhere in the corridors and chambers, the lots would already be drawn. Names would already be folded. The matchings would already be set, or claimed to be set, by the Chancellors' offices and the Solis marshals and whoever else kept the lists.

"It does not matter whether I enter," the Mysterious Cloaked Figure said. "The lots will decide."

"The lots decide the matchings," Wren said. "They do not decide who rises when the names are called."

The morning bell rang. The yard began to empty in streams and eddies, students flowing toward the lecture halls and the practice yards, Umbra and Solis parting like rivers meeting a salt tide. The Mysterious Cloaked Figure stood a moment longer, watching the lanterns gutter and steady as the last of the wind died in the high stone of the Spire. Silver-Eyed Girl stood beside them. Wren Ashfield stood a step ahead, already walking, already impatient with the gravity of the moment.

A folded paper slid under the Cloaked Figure's boot. The Mysterious Cloaked Figure bent, slowly, and picked it up. The paper was heavy, cream-laid, sealed with a sigil in violet wax that crumbled at the touch. Inside, in a neat and unhurried hand:

The first lot will be drawn at the third bell. You will be watched from that moment. You have always been watched.

The Mysterious Cloaked Figure read it twice. Then folded it once more and tucked it into the inner pocket of the cloak, where it pressed against the ribs like a cold hand. Silver-Eyed Girl had not seen. Wren had not seen. Dorian Ashworth, somewhere in the Solis ranks, had almost certainly seen.

The third bell was four hours away.

The Mysterious Cloaked Figure turned from the yard, and the morning light caught the edge of the hood for a moment, showing nothing beneath but shadow, and the shadow moved forward, into the long grey corridors of the academy, where the lots were waiting to be drawn and the Chancellor's wish was waiting to be wished and the marshlands, far to the south, were waiting, as they always waited, for the daughter of two vanished cartographers to decide what kind of heir she meant to be.

The third bell had not yet rung when Cassien Vorr was stripped of his surcoat and handed a practice blade.

The marshal who delivered it, a broad man with sun-cracked skin and the bored efficiency of a career soldier, did not meet his eyes. The blade was weighted for training, dulled at the edge, but the balance was wrong for a left-handed grip. Cassien turned it once in his palm and felt the discrepancy in his wrist before the marshal had finished his curt bow. The man retreated through the low archway, and the stone swallowed the sound of his boots.

"Cassien."

The voice came from the upper gallery, where the Solis banners hung in their slow tide of saffron and ash. Dorian Ashworth leaned against the railing, one gloved hand draped over the ironwork, the other resting on the pommel of a dueling sword that had no business being carried into the Umbra Trials. He wore a half-smile that had not changed since they were children trading insults across the Vorr practice yards. Behind the smile, his eyes were the pale green of new copper, and they counted things.

"They tell me you requested a place in the first lot." Dorian tilted his head. "I'm honored, truly. I had thought the Vorr heir had more sense."

Cassien said nothing. He rolled his shoulder, the left one, and felt the dull grind of the old injury reminding him it had not forgiven the cold weather. He had been fourteen when the horse fell on him in the marsh country. The bone had knit crooked. He had trained himself to favor the right, to disguise the limp, to keep his guard high on that side. Every sparring partner who lasted more than a season against him learned to read the tell. Dorian, he suspected, had learned it long before that.

"Rules are simple," the marshal's lieutenant called from the edge of the ring, a sunken circle of pale stone packed with grey sand. "First blood, or first yield. No killing strikes. No intervention from the gallery. The trial begins at the bell and ends when one of you admits defeat or cannot stand." He paused, as if reading the words from somewhere in his memory that he did not enjoy visiting. "May the covenant witness."

The benches were filling. Cassien could feel the weight of them, the curiosity, the political hunger of a hundred minor lords and their attendants who had come to Solis expecting pageantry and were being given blood. Somewhere behind the saffron hangings, Chancellor Duskwater would be watching. Cassien did not look for him.

Dorian descended the gallery stairs with the unhurried grace of a man crossing a ballroom. He she'd his cloak to a waiting attendant, and beneath it his dueling coat was a deep wine red, quilted at the shoulders, fitted close at the waist. He was shorter than Cassien by a hand's width but quicker in the way that foxes are quicker than hounds. His practice blade was slimmer, lighter, and he held it as though it were an extension of his wrist rather than a tool.

"For what it is worth," Dorian said, stopping two paces from the ring's edge, "I did not choose you. The lots are honest, whatever else they are." He rolled his neck. "You know what they want. A Vorr on his knees in the sand. They want it more than they want my head, which says something about the state of this court."

"Then give them what they want," Cassien said, low enough that only Dorian could hear. "Yield before the bell."

Dorian's smile widened by a fraction. "And disappoint the Chancellor? I am many things, Cassien, but I am not rude."

The bell rang.

The sound was a single iron stroke, flat and enormous, that rolled across the yard and struck the bones of every man in it. Sand shifted under Cassien's boots as he stepped forward into the circle. The light was the sourceless grey of the Spire's inner courts, but Dorian seemed to drink it. He moved first, a feint to the right shoulder, a flicker of the blade tip that Cassien did not bother to parry because it was not meant to land. It was meant to make him turn.

He turned. The left side opened. Dorian's blade came in low, a rising cut that would have split the seam of his coat if Cassien had not already stepped back. As it was, the wind of it chilled the air against his ribs.

"Still favoring it," Dorian murmured, almost fond. "I had hoped you'd grown out of that."

They circled. The sand recorded their passing in small crescent prints. Cassien kept his blade high, his weight on his back foot, his breath measured. He had been taught by men who believed that a duel was a conversation conducted in geometry. Dorian had been taught by men who believed it was a kind of lying with better music. Both schools had produced killers.

Dorian pressed. A flurry at the right, then the left, then the right again, each blow quicker than the last. The fourth struck the inside of Cassien's guard and jarred up through his wrist. He stepped into the bind rather than away, closing the distance so Dorian could not use the longer reach of his blade, and they stood for a moment hip to hip, breathing hard, eyes locked over the crossed hilts.

"You were always stubborn," Dorian said, very quietly.

"You were always cruel."

"I was always efficient. Cruelty is the Chancellor's word for it." Dorian's breath was warm against his cheek. "Yield, Cassien. Let me win this cleanly. Let us both walk away with our contracts intact."

"For which of us?"

Dorian did not answer. He broke the bind with a sharp twist of his wrist and stepped back. The next exchange was a series of brittle, ringing contacts that left Cassien's palm numb and his breathing ragged. He gave ground. He did not intend to. The sand shifted under his heel and he corrected, but the correction was a beat late and Dorian saw it.

The blade came in from the left. Cassien caught it on his secondary guard, but the impact traveled up the bones of his arm and into the old injury, and for an instant his vision whited at the edges. He staggered. He recovered. He did not yield. The crowd made a sound like a long, slow exhalation.

In the upper gallery, Ilyana Marsh stood with her back pressed against the cold stone of a buttress and her hands fisted at her sides. She was not supposed to be here. The order had been explicit, delivered by a junior marshal whose name she had already forgotten, with the particular kind of bureaucratic relish that the Chancellor's office reserved for people who had once been inconvenient and were now being made example of. She was to remain in the eastern cloister until the first lot was concluded. She was to be seen by no one.

She was seen by everyone. She did not care. Below her, the sand was darkening with the sweat of two men who had not yet drawn blood but were running out of distance between themselves and it. She watched Cassien's left shoulder dip a half-inch each time Dorian pressed the exchange, and she understood what the dip meant. She had dressed a similar wound on her mother's arm once, in the marsh country, when the binding had gone wrong and the old magic had come back through the channel like a kicked horse. The shoulder was the tell. The shoulder was always the tell.

Ilyana's fingers found the charm in the inner pocket of her coat. It was small, no larger than a walnut, and it was warm against her skin, the warmth of something that had been waiting to be used. She had made it the night before in the copper basin of her room, while the rain tapped the leaded glass and Wren Ashfield's lantern burned in the courtyard below. It was a simple thing, more prayer than craft, a knot of marsh reed and a single feather from a bird she had not been able to name. It would not heal a wound. It would dull the edge of one for a few minutes, which was often the same thing.

The steward at the rail below her was occupied with a fuss over a minor lord's dropped goblet. Ilyana moved along the gallery, slow, unhurried, the way her mother had taught her to move through rooms full of people who were not looking for her. She passed behind the steward's chair. She passed behind a knot of attendants debating the odds on the fight. She passed behind Dorian's second, a thin Solis woman whose attention was wholly given to the ring below.

The water flask sat on the small table by the gallery's service door, beside a tray of untouched cups. Ilyana palmed the charm. She unstoppered the flask with her thumb. She let the charm slip from her fingers into the amber water, where it sank without a sound and dissolved in a slow spiral of pale light that was gone before anyone could have seen it even if anyone had been watching.

She stoppered the flask. She stepped back. She was three paces away when the steward turned and looked directly at her.

"Miss Marsh." The word was a small stone dropped into still water. "I was told you were confined to the cloister."

"I was told the trials were open to witnesses of the covenant," she said. Her voice was steady, which surprised her. "I am a witness of the covenant. It is in the charter. Master Aldric can show you the page."

The steward hesitated. Below, the ring erupted in the sharp, percussive sound of a heavy blow landing. Neither of them looked. The steward's mouth worked. Ilyana did not blink.

"Stay behind the rail," he said at last. "Do not speak to the combatants. Do not pass anything to the attendants. Do not be seen again by the Chancellor's people, or I will not be able to pretend I did not see you here."

"Thank you," she said. She meant it. She returned to her buttress. Below, Cassien Vorr lifted his water flask from the ring's edge at the marshal's signal and drank.

The marshal's bell rang twice, and the gallery's murmur rose to a roar.

Below, in the ring, Cassien Vorr lowered his blade and breathed. The third round had left him with a shallow cut across the ribs and a darker one along his shoulder where his opponent's axe had bitten through the padded leather before skidding off the mail beneath. Blood ran warm beneath his gambeson. He did not look at it. He had learned long ago that looking cost time, and time was the only currency the ring understood.

His third opponent, a broad Solis man named Thel, lay on his back at the ring's center. He was breathing. His sword was two paces beyond his outstretched hand. The marshal had already begun counting.

Thel did not rise. Eight. Nine. Ten.

"Victory to Vorr," the marshal called. The words had the flat cadence of a man who had spoken them a thousand times and expected to speak them a thousand more. "Round three concluded. House Vorr retains standing. Solis House, one competitor remaining."

Cassien lifted his blade to the gallery in the salute of acknowledgment. His arm trembled once before he steadied it. He sheathed the sword and stepped back to the Vorr corner, where a steward pressed a damp cloth to his shoulder and another began unlacing his damaged gambeson. The noise of the gallery thinned into a polite hum. Somewhere above, the Chancellor's box emptied and refilled. He did not look up. He had seen enough of Duskwater's face for one morning.

The fourth round was to begin in a quarter hour. Cassien sat on the bench and let the steward wind a clean bandage around his ribs. The linen was cold. His skin was colder.

"Sir." The steward was young, Vorr house by the cut of his livery. "The marshal asks if you wish the pause extended. The cut is not deep, but you have lost blood."

"No," Cassien said. "Finish the binding and bring me the second cup."

He meant the water flask. The one Ilyana had touched. He had felt the charm's warmth travel through the silver rim and into his palm, and the drink had been easier than the first, and the second blow he had landed on Thel had been truer than any he had thrown in his life. He did not understand it. He meant to ask her. After.

The steward finished the binding and stepped away. Cassien closed his eyes and let the gallery's noise wash over him, the great sea of it, and waited for the bell.

It came too soon.

---

The corridor beyond the gallery was narrow and unlit, the kind of passage that existed in older buildings for the movement of servants and the disposal of waste. The torches in the sconces along the main hall had not yet been relit for the evening watch, and the light that reached this far was only what filtered through the cracked door at the far end, a pale wedge of grey that fell across the flagstones and did not climb the walls.

Cassien moved through it alone. He had refused the escort. The steward had argued. He had refused again, more quietly. The truth, which he did not intend to share, was that he needed the air. The ring's heat and the gallery's gaze had pressed against the inside of his skull for three rounds, and if he did not walk it off before the fourth, he would not be able to lift his sword.

He heard them before he saw them.

The first footfall was soft, the second was not. He turned. The corridor was empty behind him for a breath, and then it was not. Two shapes stepped from the side passage where the servants' stairs met the main wall. They wore no livery. They wore the plain dark wool of Solis students on leave, and their faces were young enough that the cruelty in them had not yet learned to disguise itself.

"Cassien Vorr," said the nearer one. He was tall, thin as a stile, with the kind of mouth that smiled without the rest of the face joining in. "The heir himself, walking the lower corridors like a scullery boy. Where is your honor guard, my lord?"

"In the gallery," Cassien said. He kept his voice level. He did not step back. The corridor behind them was the only way forward. "If you have business with me, name it."

"Our business," said the second, broader, with a broken nose that had healed badly and a voice like gravel in a bucket, "is that you have no business here at all. The Umbra Trials are not for your house. They never were. Every round you win is a round we have stolen from someone who deserved it."

"You are welcome to challenge me through the marshal," Cassien said. "I will meet you in the ring tomorrow, if the marshal permits it."

"There is no tomorrow." The thin one laughed, short and joyless. "There is this corridor. And the fact that you are wounded, and alone, and beneath the notice of the Chancellor's guard. And the fact that the marshal will be busy with the fourth round in a quarter hour, and no one will hear you if you call."

He moved. The broad one moved with him. They had practiced this, Cassien understood in the half-second before the first blow came. They had practiced it on each other, in the yards behind the Solis dormitory, timing their steps until the approach was a single shape and the first strike came as inevitably as a door closing.

Cassien lifted his arm. The blow landed on his forearm, where the leather of the gambeson was thinnest, and the bone beneath it sang with a sound he felt in his teeth. He staggered. The second blow came from the broad one, a fist aimed at the cut across his ribs. He turned into it, so the force glanced along his side instead of breaking it, and the broad one stumbled forward into the wall with a grunt of surprise.

Then the thin one had his arm around Cassien's throat from behind, and the broad one was raising his fist for a second try, and the corridor was very narrow and very quiet and the light through the cracked door had not changed.

Cassien reached for the knife at his belt. His fingers found the hilt. He did not draw it. The thin one's grip tightened. The broad one smiled.

"I do not know what you think you are doing."

The voice came from the doorway. It was warm, and it was shaking, and it did not belong to anyone who had been in the corridor a moment before. Ilyana Marsh stood in the wedge of grey light with her hands at her sides and her face very pale, and she was looking at the two Solis students as if she were seeing them for the first time and was not certain she was awake.

"Miss Marsh," the broad one said. He did not sound afraid. He sounded annoyed, the way a man sounds when a dog has followed him home. "This is not your concern."

"You are hurting him," Ilyana said. "That is my concern."

"It is a House matter," the thin one said. His arm tightened around Cassien's throat. Cassien's vision began to narrow at the edges. "You have no standing here. Go back to your cloister."

"I will not."

"Then we will add a Vesper witness to the evening's small unpleasantnesses," the thin one said, and nodded to the broad one, who stepped toward her with his fist already rising.

Ilyana did not move. She did not raise her hands. She did not speak a word. What she did, she did not understand, and would not understand for several days, and would spend the rest of her life trying to explain to herself.

The light in the corridor changed.

It came from inside her, or from behind her, or from nowhere at all that the corridor could measure. It was warm, and it was the colour of sunlight through a marsh at the end of summer, and it was not large. It filled the passage from wall to wall and floor to ceiling for a single breath, and in that breath the two Solis students left the ground.

The thin one's grip on Cassien's throat broke. The broad one's fist stopped mid-arc. Both of them left the flagstones as if the floor had ceased to be there, and travelled backward along the corridor at a speed that did not seem possible, and struck the far wall with a sound that was more cloth than bone, and slid down it into a heap of dark wool and pale limbs and breath that would not steady.

Cassien fell. His knees hit the stone. His hand found the wall. He breathed.

Ilyana stood where she had been. The light was gone. Her hands were still at her sides. Her face was the colour of old snow, and her eyes were very wide, and she was trembling in a way that had nothing to do with the cold.

"What," Cassien managed, "was that."

"I do not know," she said. Her voice was small and honest and very afraid. "I do not know. I have never done that before. I have never done anything like that before."

He looked down the corridor. The two Solis students were not moving. One of them was breathing in the shallow, careful way of a man who had hit his head and was deciding whether to pretend he had not. The other was staring at the ceiling.

From the doorway behind Ilyana, a sound. The soft, deliberate clearing of a throat that did not need to be cleared.

"Well," said Master Aldric Vesper. "That was sooner than I expected."

He stepped into the corridor. He was wearing the same robe he had worn at the trial, and his hands were folded at his waist, and his face held the expression of a man who had been watching from a place that did not exist and had decided, at last, to be seen.

"Master Aldric," Ilyana whispered.

"I have been here since the third bell," he said, mildly. "I wished to see how you would behave when the trial was no longer between you and the outcome. I confess I had hoped for something less spectacular."

He moved past her without hurry. He did not look at Cassien. He walked to the far end of the corridor, where the two Solis students lay, and stood over them with his hands still folded and his head a little to one side, as if he were considering a flower that had not bloomed the way the almanac had promised.

"You," he said to the thin one. "And you." He looked at the broad one. "You attacked a Vesper witness in the lower corridors of the trial hall. You assaulted the competitor of House Vorr in the pause between sanctioned rounds. You did so in plain sight of an elder of the Order and a sworn witness of the covenant."

The thin one found his voice. "The Vesper woman attacked us. You saw the light. She threw us across the corridor with magic that is forbidden within the trial grounds. The penalty is clear. The penalty is expulsion. The penalty is the forfeiture of her house's standing. She is the aggressor here, Master Aldric. She is the criminal. We were merely walking the corridor when she came upon us unprovoked and struck us down with an unsanctioned working of the covenant light. You saw it. You were there. You must speak what you saw."

Master Aldric considered this. His face did not change.

"I saw," he said, "two Solis students seize the heir of House Vorr from behind, strike him in the ribs where his wound was not yet bound, and threaten him with further injury in a passage where no guard would have heard him call. I saw a Vesper witness intervene to prevent that injury. I saw no unsanctioned working. The corridor is not within the trial grounds. The light, if there was a light, was a natural reflex of a sworn witness under threat. It is covered by the charter, page seven, line four. I will not be cross-examined on it by a student who has just been caught with his hands at another man's throat."

He let the silence lengthen.

"You will escort yourselves back to the Solis dormitory," he said. "You will inform your dean that you were set upon by unknown assailants in the lower corridors, that you were aided by a Vesper witness and a passing elder of the Order, and that you have no complaint to lodge. If any complaint is lodged, by any party, I will lay the charter open on the Chancellor's table and read what it says about assault in the lower corridors in the pause between sanctioned rounds. The Chancellor will then be required to act on it. The Chancellor does not wish to act on it. We have an understanding, the Chancellor and I. You will not be the reason that understanding ends."

He paused.

"Do you understand me?"

The thin one understood. The broad one understood. They rose. They left. The corridor was quiet.

Cassien sat on the flagstones with his back against the wall and his hand pressed to his ribs. The blood had soaked through the bandage. He did not care. He was looking at Ilyana, who had not moved, and whose face had not regained its colour.

"Master Aldric," he said. "What she did."

"Yes," Master Aldric said. He came back down the corridor, slowly, the way a man walks when he is older than he pretends to be. "What she did."

He stopped in front of her. He did not touch her. He did not speak for a long moment.

"The light you carry is not yours to use, child," he said. "It is the covenant's. It answers to the charter, and to the Order, and to the binding that your mother gave her life to seal. You have opened it tonight, in a place where it should not have been opened, because your heart was quicker than your learning. That will be the subject of many long conversations between us, in rooms where no one can hear us weep. For now, know that you have not broken anything. You have only shown me what I needed to see."

He turned to Cassien.

"And you, my lord, will accept the escort of my steward back to the gallery, and you will drink nothing else that is offered to you by any hand but your own, and you will win the fourth round, and you will lose no more blood than you have already lost, and you will come to my tower at the seventh bell tomorrow morning, and you will not speak of this corridor to anyone, including the Chancellor, including your father, including the steward who is at this moment standing outside the doorway pretending very hard that he has not heard a word."

Cassien rose. He bowed, which cost him more than he let show.

"And her?" he asked.

"She comes with me now," Master Aldric said. "She has a great deal of shaking to do before she is fit for company. The rest can wait."

Ilyana did not speak. Master Aldric offered her his arm. She took it. The two of them passed through the doorway and into the light beyond, where the steward waited with his face very carefully arranged, and the sound of the gallery rose to meet them, and the bell for the fourth round rang once, twice, and was silent.

Cassien Vorr stood alone in the corridor. The blood on his side was cooling. The charm in his pocket was still warm. He listened to the bell, and to the silence that followed it, and then he straightened his gambeson and walked back to the ring.