Page 53

CHAPTER

Fifty-Three

W HEN THE CONTENDERS reached the Festival Square they found the stalls empty and the fight platform dismantled. In their place, a troop of Samran Hounds performed a sequence of elaborate drills, turning, shifting and merging in tight, scripted unison.

Shal watched them with a frown, as if they were an equation he could not quite solve. “What’s going on?” he muttered.

Tala took off her headband and scrubbed a hand through her hair. She was still out of sorts. “They’re your people, Shal. Why don’t you ask them?”

The Hound contender’s eyes gleamed, then faded. “They’re not my people.”

“The morning fights have been cancelled.” Vabras was sitting in the contenders’ pavilion, working at a portable desk. He smiled thinly as they finally noticed him.

The departure of Havoc and Katsan had provided an opportunity to improve the schedule. With the number of fights reduced by half to four, they could all take place together, in the afternoon. “A chance for you to rest and recover,” Vabras said.

“No one thought to tell us?” Tala snapped.

The High Commander did not look up from his work. “I am telling you.”

Neema gritted her teeth in alarm as Tala pressed on, angrily. “The whole court knew before us.” She waved to the empty stalls. “You could have sent a message instead of letting us turn up here like idiots.”

Silence, except for the scraping of Vabras’s pencil. He was writing out the new fight schedule, one copy for each of them. Somewhere within that silence, that whispering scrape of pencil on paper, Tala understood she had made a mistake. A bad one.

“High Command—”

“Contender Talaka,” Vabras interrupted, with perfect timing. He kept on writing. “Your wife left the island this morning without permission, taking your child with her. If it were down to me,” a lift of an eyebrow, “I would have her tracked down and charged with sedition.”

Tala clenched her fists. “My wife is a loyal citizen—”

“She disobeyed a direct imperial order.” Vabras put down his pencil. “People have been hanged for less.”

“ Oof ,” Cain breathed.

Shal, pretending to rub his beard, traced a discreet sign of the eight over his lips.

“Luckily for your wife, and your child ,” the emphasis Vabras made was chilling, “his majesty has more important things on his mind. You are beneath his interest. For now.” He held out the schedules for Neema to collect. She took one, and passed them along.

With his usual grim efficiency, Vabras had reduced the contenders down to their Guardian name:

FOX VS RAVEN

OX VS HOUND

TIGER VS DRAGON

(QUARTER HOUR brEAK)

FOX VS HOUND

Shal read it through first. “What’s the break for?”

“Ruko’s funeral,” Cain said.

“The Hound and the Fox—” Vabras began.

Cain stiffened. “Don’t call me that.”

“—have two fights this afternoon. Your respective contingents petitioned for the break.”

“Does the Monkey Trial remain the same?” Ruko asked.

“If it had changed, I would have said so.” Vabras rose from his desk, and turned to Neema. “You failed to submit anything for the exhibition, Contender Kraa. I presume you forgot, amid all the…” He ran his tongue over his teeth, considering how to encapsulate everything Neema had been subjected to, these past four days. “… drama.”

Neema hadn’t forgotten. She’d deliberately ignored Kindry’s request for a selection of her calligraphy work. Sabotaging herself, to help Cain.

“I sent over six pieces from the imperial archives on your behalf,” Vabras said, turning to leave. “I am no judge of such things, but I’m told they should suffice.”

Neema poured herself a glass of water, waiting for another attack from Tala, but the Ox contender was distracted by the Samran Hounds. They had moved on to a weapons drill, swords flashing as their commander inspected their form, up and down the rows. Cain draped an arm over Tala’s shoulder and whispered something reassuring before drawing her away. Neema felt an irrational stab of jealousy.

Ruko was also walking away, which left only Shal. “These Samrans,” he said, from the corner of his mouth. “I don’t like what I see in them. What I don’t see in them,” he corrected himself. “They’ve been counter-trained, against Houndsight.” He moved a hand across his face. Blank.

“I didn’t know that was possible.”

“Their commander has the Sight. I suppose they practised on him.” He paused. “This story about Gaida. They’re saying she killed herself.”

“No. She loved life. She loved herself.” Neema winced. “That came out wrong.”

Shal laughed. “No, no. You’re right. Gaida had a healthy respect for her own…”

“Magnificence.”

“Right.” Shal laughed again. “Her own magnificence. And Katsan?”

Neema hesitated. She trusted Shal, but she was conscious now of the Hound commander out in the square. She waited until his attention was elsewhere and said, “She’ll take a message to the Bears. There are things… I can’t speak openly, Shal.”

He lifted a hand—no need. “‘A chance for you to rest and recover,’” he said, quoting Vabras.

Neema had noticed that too—an odd phrase from the man who never seemed to rest. A man who would never alter a schedule if he could avoid it.

“‘A chance for you ,’” Shal repeated. “He was looking at Ruko.”

Ruko had been due to fight the Visitor this morning, straight after the gruelling Bear Trial. With Havoc’s removal, Ruko now had time to recuperate. Havoc was the emperor’s man. His withdrawal from the Festival must have come as an imperial order. For some reason, Vabras and the emperor wanted Ruko to win, and were working behind the scenes to make that happen. But why? Had they made a pact with the Tigers? Even with all that she knew, it seemed an unlikely alliance. And Ruko did not strike her as a man willing to share power.

“Why didn’t you leave with Sunur, and Suru?” Shal asked.

Neema shook her head. “Vabras said it. They’re beneath his notice. I’m not.” She finished her water. Time to head over to the Monkey palace, for the first part of the Trial. She looked at Shal, curious. “What did you submit?”

“Watercolours.” His expression darkened. “I wanted to paint her. What they did to her.” Yana. Never far from the Hound contender’s mind. “But I couldn’t do that, obviously, so… I painted the forest. I painted Dolrun. Let them fill in the rest.”

“Astonishing,” Lady Harmony Arbell-Ranor declared, touching a slender, jewelled hand to her throat. She stepped closer, then stepped back, studying Neema’s work from different angles. The six long scrolls had been mounted expertly on silk and suspended from the ceiling. Lady Harmony walked through them, as if she were walking through a magic forest. “Exquisite,” she murmured.

Early afternoon in the Monkey palace, in a wooden lodge flooded with light and crammed with people. The first half of the Sixth Trial was underway, and it was indeed a trial—the contenders standing awkwardly next to their work as Monkey courtiers came by to tilt their heads, and nod sagely, and whisper opinions in each other’s ears.

Lady Harmony peered at a modern poem translated into the ancient pictorial style. An experiment Neema had tried out one evening, simply to pass the time.

Lady Harmony spanned her hand, and waved it over the piece, sanctifying it. “This is a great work. This is the best of them.” She turned, with reluctance, to the artist. “Who taught you?”

“Me.” Neema laughed, touching her chest. “I taught myself.”

“No. You had a teacher.” Lady Harmony’s blue chiffon scarf had slid across one shoulder. She adjusted it.

“I learned the basics at school, in Scartown. My teacher there, Madam Fessi Aark—”

“Fessi Casinor,” Lady Harmony’s eyelashes fluttered as she made the connection. The Casinors were a Venerant family. Aark was her Raven name. “Of course. She set up a school in the slums.”

“They weren’t slums—”

“Darling, you abandoned me.” Lord Clarion glided up and kissed his wife on the mouth.

“No darling.” She tugged playfully at his greying curls. “You abandoned me.”

They laughed, delighted with each other.

Lord Clarion stepped back to assess Neema’s work.

“Look at this one, darling,” Lady Harmony drew him over to her favourite. “A modern verse, but written in the ancient style.”

“Fascinating.”

“It’s about the yearning for a golden age.”

“It really isn’t,” Neema said.

“You see the clarity of the strokes, the balance, the spacing. The artist is telling us we must look to our ancestors. We must restore the natural order of those days.”

“No, I’m not.”

Lady Harmony rubbed her husband’s back. “She is oblivious to the meaning, of course. An instinctive artist, as one must expect from one of her level. It is for us to read the message.”

“Fascinating,” Lord Clarion mused. “Fascinating.”

They strolled off together, hand in hand, to view Tala’s pottery.