Page 2 of Ironhold, Trial Two

A sword whistles past my head, touching the golden strands of my hair as I duck, barely missing me. I roll, not caring about the dirt that the move throws up into the air, and come back to my feet with my trident raised in an overhand grip.

Another blow is already coming my way, but I'm faster than I was when I was first taken as a gladiator. Months of training have done that much for me, at least. I twist aside from it, my net wrapping around my opponent's legs. I wrench it to pull her legs from under her. She goes down hard, the breath going from her body in a grunt of pain.

Zara lies there on the ground, flame-red hair spilling around her in waves. She looks utterly helpless, caught in the net. I move to help her up, and I'm rewarded by the touch of a wooden sword against my throat.

“The bout doesn't stop just because you knocked me down, Lyra,” Zara points out, sounding annoyed that I should try to help her like that. “You need to finish me with your trident.”

We both know I'm not going to do that. I have gotten to the point where I can spar with blunted wooden weapons, where I am happy to learn how to fight, but there is still no part of me that can imagine killing a downed opponent in cold blood. It is enough to survive in the arena; I don't want to have to kill every foe as well.

“You were doing better,” Rowan says, from the side, trying to encourage me. “Moving much more smoothly.”

Rowan is taller than me and massively built with auburn hair and solid muscles. Like me, like most of the gladiators here at Ironhold, he has an iron collar around his neck, proclaiming that he is not here by choice. Rowan used to be a slave to Lady Tyra, an important noble woman of Aetheria, until she tired of him. He has a faint silvery scar on his cheek, which she inflicted on him before she sent him away, either to show how much he had angered her or to make sure that no one else would ever want him. I think it only adds to his good looks. His presence at the edge of the training pit is distracting, to say the least. It’s all too easy to think about what we could be doing together instead.

“You say that like you're surprised,” I counter. “I've been here long enough now. We all have.”

Long enough to survive a whole season of bouts in the Colosseum of Aetheria. Long enough that the circular brand on my shoulder has a single line across it, proclaiming my success. Five of those, five seasons survived, and I will be free, a citizen of the city. Any children I have will be considered noble born.

But first I must survive another four seasons, facing both gladiators and beasts, fighting with both steel and magic.

“Let's give Zara a break and see how you do against a different opponent,” Rowan says. He jumps down into the practice pit. In the mornings, we are all drilled hard by Lord Darius, the former gladiator who is master of Ironhold. Along with Lady Selene Ravenscroft, the arch magistrate, he organizes the games. The rest of the time we practice amongst ourselves, striving to get better, striving to gain the skills we need to survive.

There is no question of simply taking time off between seasons at the arena. The holy days of the empire of Aetheria are infrequent, but we must be ready when the next ones come around. Any hesitation, any weakness, might mean the difference between life and death for us.

My body has hardened with the training. I am still slender and fine-boned, but now lean muscle defines my frame, and I am tanned under the hot sun, my blonde hair almost bleached white by it.

“Show me what you can do,” Rowan says, snatching up a wooden short sword and small shield, representing his preferred tools in the arena. I circle him with my own weapons, the trident and net picked by Lord Darius to reflect the fishing village from which I came, and to allow me to move around a larger opponent, trying to ensnare them. It is a fighting style that requires me to hit and move, never stopping. Rowan watches me with a faint smile, but his green eyes are unwavering.

I feint with the net, stabbing with the trident, but he reads the movement. Rowan has a talent for feeling and controlling the earth, where I can connect with beasts, and Zara can manipulate water. Aetheria seized us at least as much for those magical talents as for any fighting prowess. His talent means that he can read every shift of my weight and make the ground unstable under my feet.

He moves in quickly with multiple attacks, ducking under the sweep of my net. I thrust at him again with my trident, but the attack is halfhearted, because I don't want to risk him running onto it and being injured. An injury would slow his training down and reduce the chances of him surviving the next bouts. Because I do not put my full strength in, though, that lets him knock the blow aside.

He's at close range now, tripping me to the floor, landing on top of me in the dirt. He's just inches away from me, the feel of his muscles pressed against me hard to ignore. He lingers there, the moment seeming to extend between us.

“How is it that every bout you have ends like this?” Zara demands from the side. “Get a room you two.”

That's enough to make Rowan get up. The truth is that we've been so cautious with one another in the time since the end of the first season at the Colosseum. We have kissed, we have been close, but that is it. I have been told that any entanglement might be used against me, and it is obvious that Rowan has scars from his time as the plaything of a noble woman that run much deeper than the silvery one on his face. And Rowan hasn’t pushed. He’s waited for me to be ready and… and I get the feeling he’s hanging back for other reasons, too.

I get up, disappointed both at my loss and that it didn’t go further. “Rowan is just a better fighter than I am.”

“That's only true because you aren't willing to hurt me,” Rowan says. “And because your powers aren't good for practice bouts. You can't exactly summon a shadow cat here.”

In my last fight in the Colosseum, I called such a beast to my side, a great predator from one of the jungles on the fringes of the Aetherian Empire, brought to the arena to fight and die. They have the ability to step from one shadow to another without crossing the intervening space, as easily as slinking along forest paths. It mortally wounded one of my foes and seriously injured another. Just the memory of it makes me wince.

“Maybe that's just as well,” Zara says. “Although it does leave you vulnerable.”

There is a pitcher of water near the side of the pit for us to cool off. She makes some of that water jump up out of it, splashing over me and Rowan, both as a reminder that we should be practicing rather than getting close to one another and as a way of showing off her own abilities. The water glistens from Rowan’s muscles as it falls, a little too neatly, suggesting that Zara is making it happen, just to taunt me a little. I have seen her drown someone in the middle of the dry sands of the Colosseum, wrapping a bubble of water around his head until he collapsed.

This is a brutal world that we are forced to be a part of.

We have no choice. We are contained within the fortress of Ironhold, its walls ringed by soldiers, the whole place designed to keep us in rather than the world out. If we refuse to train, refuse to hurt others, we are punished. There are iron spikes on the walls to threaten the ultimate price of rebellion. At least one skeleton hangs on them, long since picked clean by crows.

I am still staring that way when Naia comes running up to us.

“Have you heard the news?” She calls. She is shorter than me and dark-haired, her hair shaved on one side and long on the other. As with the rest of us she was brought here against her will and has survived her first season in the Colosseum. She has spent much of her time between the games working in the infirmary of Ironhold. Where I was taught how to stitch wounds and heal them with poultices, her talent lets her heal them with a touch. Aetheria prizes such talents, but not enough to let her avoid battle. In the arena, she heals her own wounds, able to charge through anything that does not kill her outright.

“What news?” I ask. Worry instantly thrums through me, fear that Lord Darius might have come up with some brutal new training regime or might have decided to throw us all into additional bouts. He is relentless in pushing us. He seems to feel that if he forces us into the fire, we will come out hardened and ready for battle like a fresh blade. He doesn't seem to care how many break or are killed in the process. He seems to truly believe in the Colosseum as a holy place, where gladiators shed their blood for the glory of Aetheria. Along with Lady Selene, he picks out the bouts that will be most entertaining.

“There's a new intake of gladiators,” Naia says. “Well… hopefuls still, I guess. Come on, they’re just arriving. You won't want to miss it.”

I can’t share her excitement at the prospect, even if it is the first thing to truly change in Ironhold for several months now. I can still remember my own first day in Ironhold, being put through brutal exercises. Do I want to watch that happening to others? But Rowan, Zara and Naia are already moving off in the direction of the main area in front of the gates. I decide to follow them. I am as curious as they are in my own way. We are cut off from much of the world here in the fortress, getting news secondhand at best. Some of the free gladiators seem to know more because they have contacts in Aetheria. A few even seem to be able to step beyond Ironhold, although I do not understand how.

Any change, any connection to the outside world, is something we cannot miss. So I go with the others, walking along the twists and turns of the fortress, passing by the baths and the rooms for training, the punishment rooms and the places devoted to the great gladiators of the past. It is a warren made from granite and filled with flickering torches, the threat of violence always there.

We come out into the stands of one of the main practice areas, a vast, sandy arena complete with obstacles and rocks to lift. There are wooden posts on which to practice striking with weapons, and there are racks of training gear.

There are also almost twenty men and women standing in chains, with Lord Darius Blackthorn assessing them the way a farmer might judge the strength and quality of cattle. He is a middle-aged man, his dark hair starting to grey, his body still powerful, reflecting the strength that he built as a gladiator. There is steel in his gaze as it falls on each of them.

In the stands, many of the existing gladiators are gathered, staring at the newcomers, trying to guess which will make it, and which will be rejected, sent to the slave blocks of the city to be sold on. I do not know whether to hope that these people will make it into Ironhold, because that represents their best chance of freedom, or to hope that they do not, because I know how deadly the Colosseum can be, how likely they are to lose their lives in its confines.