Oleander

XIII. Cermonies (part four)

As a champion, his bout would open the week-long event. Mathais against the other eight. Chosen to incite the crowd and begin the tournament. Yalira fought to keep her fingers from digging into the chair, from alerting Andar to her distress.

She willed her pulse to slow its anxious rhythm, its frantic trill. She focused on the leather vambraces that covered his arms—a testament to his training in Antalis. The guards were not trained for war, for siege, but to protect the temple and the priestesses to whom they'd sworn their lives. He had survived Andar's destruction of Antalis. Perhaps he can survive this too.

The nine champions formed a wide circle on the white sand, testing the weight of their weapons in their hands. Mathais, lean and beardless, looked woefully youthful compared to the other eight. His spear dwarfed him. The men's debate had not been false: while some of these chosen fighters were handsome, the bulk of them were trained and weathered, accomplished killers and battle-tested brutes.

The crowd roared, thirsty for death.

At the sound of a brass horn, the circle pulsed. The voices below screamed its favorites, the men behind her wagering on the winner and critiquing strategy, but Yalira only had eyes for Mathais.

He was still, unflinching, as the two warriors who flanked him in the circle turned, one with a hammer, the other a trident and net. Bare feet planted in the sand, he let the two pace around him, wolves amongst prey.

The trident-wielder tested Mathais's resolve, thrusting the pronged weapon mockingly, laughing with a wide smile. Yalira could not hear his jeers over the crowd, the sound of metal against ironwood, but she saw the narrowed disgust in her champion's eyes.

An echoing bellow from the crowd. The mark of the first death—Rishi's chosen. A pretty choice, according to the men. The queen only smiled and shrugged. Sipping her wine, Rishi was the perfect portrait of a gracious loser.

Yalira's eyes flicked toward the carnage. The man's blood, his entrails, stained the sand in gory crimson. She had seen worse wounds, but from her vantage afar, a passive witness to celebrated suffering, she felt helpless. This ploy for tradition, for the people's love was not worth human life. Her fingers curled into a fist beneath Andar's hand.

They tightened over hers. A warning? Or empathy?

She met his eyes from the corner of hers. In that burning bronze there was no pleasure, no interest in the fight below. Andar of Tyr was bored by the games just as surely as he would not let her stop them.

You chose this, their fire seemed to say. Yalira's skin prickled with the condemnation, the censure. In his horrible way, he was correct. For the sake of strategy, she had chosen to sacrifice these lives in place of the many more she might save. Killers and thieves, traitors and slaves, their deaths were nonetheless at her hands. Eyes burning, Yalira committed their faces to her memory.

Mathais had not strayed from his spot in the sand, deflecting attacks with the pole of his spear, leaning and twisting out of his opponents' reach. As if his enemies moved through water, he countered their steps with sharp precision. Yalira expected stoicism, expressionless calculation, but her champion was not Andar of Tyr. In each warding blow, his face burned with silent fury.

"He fights well, your champion," Rodan conceded. "But can he kill?"

It did not seem so. The crowded cheered him—Antalis!—as another chosen defeated his opponent and joined the group of attackers. Two men dead in the sand, a trio surrounding Mathais, and three caught in separate throes.

The new challenger, bearing sword and shield, lunged with savage brutality, his blood-mottled blade tearing through the air.

If Yalira had blinked, she would have missed it. She had been raised beside the boys who would become guards, watched their training with disinterested eyes. Now she could not look away.