Hearts in Zenith (Four Husbands and a Lover)

59. She Who Kills Elephants

The tunnel leading to the arena was hot. I fanned myself, trying to forget about the rays of the afternoon sun. At least we weren't heavily armored. Ondrey wore leather jerkin over padded doublet, tunic, hose and soft-soled boots. Same for me, except I went barefoot and added fingerless gloves. Between the two of us, we carried five axes and one short spear slung on my back.

"Sweetheart, you look so good, it's distracting," I said.

A slow smile spread over Ondrey's features, making me ten times hotter. I grabbed his face into my hands and kissed his smiling lips for luck.

"May Mythra favor you," I whispered.

"May Mythra favor you," he replied.

My shoulder brushing his arm, I walked into the giant sunburnt bowl of the arena. It was filled to the brims. The crowds on the stands should have been placid like flies in this heat, but their cheering was shaking mortar from the walls. I threw my arms up in the air saluting the citizens of Bhar. Thousands of throats roared their approval with renewed vigor. Blinding, deafening, glorious!

I knelt before the royal balcony. I sat on another balcony like that only a few days ago. To be honest, I preferred my current position, away from Makeda and wearing armor instead of muslin. I liked being prepared for anything--and I was.

Taffiz had taken us to study the arena in the middle of the night. We had walked its breadth and width, referencing the walls until we could navigate it blindfolded. A death match is a battle, and in a battle you know your terrain or you pray to the Divines.

Ondrey, Taffiz and I ended our recon standing in the exact same place where we were standing now.

Taffiz nostrils flared. He was like a racehorse hearing the sounds of the drums from its stable.

"Envious?" I teased. "I thought you weren't much of a fighter?"

He chuckled and slipped a sheath from my secret weapon. It wasn't just the fur he removed to reveal the newly forged steel. He removed my doubts about his loyalty. Ondrey smacked him on the back, and I... I took my black steel dagger reborn as the blade of a short, heavy spear from Taffiz' hands, pretending to ignore his fingers. They curled around mine for a blink of an eye. Maybe he wasn't a front-line fighter, but his reflexes were astonishing.

This spear was now strapped to my back, waiting for its moment. Taffiz sat hidden in the crowd. Was the death-from-the-shadows still envious of me? For some reason, I believed he was.

When the metal grate opposite to the tunnel I had exited with Ondrey grounded upward and our opponent thundered forward from it, was Taffiz envious then?

The first eyeful... and the earful... and the noseful of our foe hit home. She was kicking up clouds of sand to the sky with her columnar feet. Trumpeting erupted from between two tusks burdening her huge head.

There are no braver women in the Knowable World than the pilgrims to the holiest sites who pray for a Divine to manifest and quicken their wombs with the Divine's—essence, not seed, they call it—but I can't vouch for how accurate that is. For the Divines are neither male, nor female; neither human, nor animals. They are everything. When the divine touches the human, there is no knowing what would happen to the mother. The half-divine offspring could be anything. Beautiful, monstrous, deformed, precocious or stillborn they could emerge into the Knowable World. Their reasons and gifts are beyond a mortal mind's comprehension.

The divine parent bestowed upon my opponent a nine-feet tall frame with an elephant's hindquarters, round belly of a slovenly human, rolling shoulders ending in two muscular arms each and an elephantine head. Her hide was gray and wrinkled, covered by fuzz. The humans gave her a skirt of metal plates and a strap to bind her breasts for modesty's sake. Intelligence flickered between the folds of her eyelids, but without tempering sentiments.