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My opponent circles me, pacing carefully, never taking its eyes off me. Its tail swishes in the moment before it strikes, giving me just enough time to get to the haft of my spear up between us.

The shadow cat leaps, but it's a trick. Rather than leaping directly at me, it leaps at my shadow, pouncing on it and disappearing into it with the magic of its kind. It seems to melt into the ground, and I spin, knowing it will already be reappearing somewhere else.

It does, jumping out of a spot away to my left where a couple of bales of hay have left their shadow across the ground. This is what makes the creatures so dangerous. In the wild, the great cats with their ink dark coats would hunt through the forest, slinking from one shadow to the next, pouncing on unsuspecting prey. In the colosseum of Aetheria, they are deadly additions to any games, adding an element of surprise and unpredictability to the bouts that is in contrast to the brute power of other beasts.

The shadow cat leaps at me again, and I twist my lean frame away from it. I'm clad in the brief skirt, sandals and halter top that Ironhold gives to its female gladiators for training. My skin started pale but has been bronzed by the time I have spent fighting and training in the hot sun of Aetheria. My golden hair whips around as I dodge the shadow cat’s attack. I'm close enough to see the deep gold of the creature’s eyes, utterly alien compared to my own blue.

We move around, circling one another again. I am starting to sweat, but the creature is breathing hard as well, it focuses on me, ready to leap once more. It is still small for one of its kind, but it is almost fully grown now.

My foot catches and I stumble just for a moment but that is enough for the shadow cat. It pounces on me, my spear barely holding its claws off me, its mouth open to display teeth like daggers. It is heavier than I expect it to be, its weight pinning me down, and for a moment I know fear.

Then I reach out with the power that is my birthright, the magic that lives within me. There is a golden thread of connection between myself and the shadow cat. I whisper along it from mind to mind.

“That’s enough playing for now.”

The shadow cat makes a sound of disappointment, licks my face once with a sandpaper tongue, as if to prove it can, and then lets me up.

“I still don't understand the connection you have with that creature,”

Stefano, the master of beasts at Ironhold, says. He is a solidly built man in his fifties, with thinning, dark hair and a bushy mustache. His talent is for healing, although he mostly reserves it for the animals. He seems to genuinely love the creatures in his care. “Is it harder with that dampener in place?”

He nods towards the leather strap on my left wrist, worked with magical runes. It is a device designed to contain the powers of the wearer, and which cannot be removed by them. Mine was put in place to limit me after I was deemed a danger to the crowd. It should restrict me to just a trickle of magic but the arch magistrate, Selene Ravenscroft, has surreptitiously altered it so that it now only appears to be a dampener. I have access to my full powers; I just can't show it. No one can see that I am not contained the way I should be.

“I think it helps that I already have a connection to the cat,”

I say, with a smile towards the shadow cat. It slinks back into place in its pen. Most of the other shadow cats in the beast pens are kept within magically engraved cages designed to stop them from using their powers. The Aetherian Empire has come up with many ways to contain those people and things who possess magic.

“Thank you for letting me train down here, Stefano,”

I say. Ordinarily, the master of beasts would not allow gladiators to simply come down here to practice with the creatures. He would be afraid for the safety of both the gladiators and the beasts.

“Well, I know you're not going to hurt them,”

Stefano says, “and I guess you have the skills to keep from being hurt in return.”

Even with me, those are his priorities; he cares more about his creatures than he does about the gladiators who come and go within Ironhold. He makes it sound like a simple thing that I'm allowed to train down here, but in truth it makes a huge difference to me.

I have almost no one else to train with.

I leave the beast pens heading to the bathhouse.

Some of the other female gladiators are in there, but they all stay away from me.

Many of them look afraid, and a couple of them look at me with jealousy, as if I have some kind of status beyond that of a mere slave gladiator, with an iron ring around my neck marking me as less than those who have entered the games voluntarily.

I see the gladiator Cesca in one of the pools.

She is relatively new to the games.

Each of us has a brand on our left shoulder: a perfect circle burned into our flesh, with lines across it marking the number of seasons we have survived in the colosseum.

Her brand has a single line across it, while mine has four.

One more and I will be free, while she must survive four more seasons in the colosseum.

Not just free.

If I survive five seasons, I will be a champion of the games.

I will be a noble of Aetheria and accorded every honor.

Any children I have will be noble, and I will no doubt get offers of positions within noble households, maybe even offers of marriage.

There is a reason that some of the free citizens of the city choose to come into the games, even the nobles.

They see it as a path to advancement within Aetheria, as a way to prove themselves worthy of positions of power and influence.

In a city built on the twin pillars of magic and military might, the arena is the way to prove that they embody its virtues.

Cesca looks over as I enter the pool.

She briefly looks afraid, and I find it hard to believe that someone I know should feel that way about me.

But somewhere in my time within the arena I have acquired a reputation for ruthlessness, even as I have tried to be as merciful as I can.

She backs away from me, making to leave the pool.

“Cesca, where are you going?”

I ask her.

She can barely bring herself to look at me. “You're a dangerous person to be around. You know they say you killed your last patron? And I saw the way you killed Ravenna. Being your friend… it didn't do Naia or Zara a lot of good, did it?”

I want to snap at her, but I know she has a reason to feel pain about at least Zara’s death. Cesca has a habit of attaching herself to stronger gladiators for protection within the prison fortress of Ironhold. She picked out Ravenna, and then Zara, as protectors at different points, and I’m pretty sure Cesca and Zara were lovers for a time. It means I've taken people from her and also taken away some of her protection.

“I didn't mean for either of them to die,” I say.

She gestures to me. “This is what you do. You pretend to be so innocent. Like you would never do anything to hurt someone. But then you're happy enough to kill them when you have a reason to. And it doesn’t matter if you mean it. People keep dying around you. It isn't safe to be near you.”

She collects her things and heads for the door. The others in the baths don't leave immediately, but they don't come near me either. They don't want anything to do with me. They don't seem to want to risk it. I don't think any of them hate me, but I'm almost certain most of them are afraid of me now. That isn't something I want, but it's also not something I can give my attention to correcting.

I finish up in the bathhouse and head to the dining hall of the fortress. Mostly it is filled with the slave gladiators and the poorest among the free ones, because the nobles have their food brought to them in their rooms. Again, I can feel eyes on me as I walk in, looking at me warily, as if wondering what I will do next.

There is only one welcoming face in the room. Rowan sits at one of the tables, broad-shouldered and heavily muscled with auburn hair and green eyes. He waves me over to him. I grab a bowl of stew and join him. Rowan is one of the few comforting presences at Ironhold for me now. He's also one of the only people prepared to train with me outside of the formal training every morning.

“Have you been down in the beast pits again?” he asks.

I nod. “It's good training.”

“It's dangerous when your powers are bound,”

he replies.

I haven't even been able to tell him that I have my powers back. Anyone who knows would be in danger. As far as the world is concerned, I am effectively a null, one of the few in Aetheria without even a hint of magic. Rowan has only a little magic but he makes the most of his control over earth and stone, either to make the ground unsteady under his opponents’ feet, or to sense what they are doing through the vibrations of the earth.

“I'm just working with the shadow cat,” I say.

“Even with that, you don't have the control that you should,”

Rowan insists. “What if it turns on you?”

“It won't,”

I assure him.

“You can't know that,”

he insists.

I need a way to distract him before he pushes me to say too much, and I can only think of one.

“Has Lady Tyra been in contact with you again?” I ask.

Lady Tyra is Rowan’s former owner, before she sold him into the colosseum.

Rowan has a thin, silvery scar on his cheek, which she inflicted on him when she tired of him, trying to make sure that no one would find him handsome again.

It hasn't worked. If anything, it only adds to the character of his face. The noblewoman has started trying to reassert her control over Rowan, using the fact that she still has his sisters as her property.

“She wants me to spend time with her during the next games,”

Rowan says. “I won't have much choice about it.”

His tone is bitter.

He has three successful seasons in the Colosseum, with two more to go before his freedom.

Once he's free he hopes to be able to buy his sisters out of servitude.

But none of that counts for anything right now.

I wish I could help him with it, but there is only one thing I can focus on at the moment, and that is Alaric.

Alaric, beautiful Alaric, with his features too fine to ever be called merely handsome, and his waves of dark hair, his lean body and his caustic self-regard.

He currently languishes in a cell somewhere within Aetheria.

He waits for judgment after he killed a gladiator to save me.

He is noble born, with a family probably higher born than anyone else who has given themselves into the games, but I am not sure if that will help him in this.

Not when the emperor seems to be pushing for his punishment.

The penalty for killing another gladiator outside of a sanctioned match is death.

Alaric’s family and connections have delayed that, but I am not sure that they can avoid it forever.

If he had been a slave gladiator such as myself, his body would already be on one of the impaling spikes set around the perimeter of Ironhold.

I must find a way to help him, but the truth is I have very few options from within the fortress.

Maybe if I get out of Ironhold, if I find a position within Aetheria’s nobility, I will be able to gain enough influence to save him, to protect him.

That is the reason I am so desperate to succeed.

I'm not just fighting for my freedom but for his, as well.