Chapter 3: Practice

"Today you will spend training for the first bouts, which will be held in the morning. You will come back to the castle at lunchtime and at dinner to socialize with the royal family and to eat properly." Syaoran gave the royal messenger only part of his attention -- most of him was focused on searching the crowd for the green-eyed girl he met the day before.

He hadn't been too upset to wake up and realize that he had entered the contest for the princess of the Kinomoto Kingdom. He just had to make very sure not to win, was all. It was a strange paradox inside him. He didn't want to win the tournament, but he wanted to do well in order to impress the champion.

He blushed a little as he realized his own intentions. He had never . . . wanted . . . to impress a woman before. But now he very desperately did, and it confused him.

"May I introduce to you all today to the champion for the princess." Syaoran's head snapped up. There she was, standing by the royal messenger and looking pretty and fresh in her white ribbons. "Her role is to defeat those unworthy of the Princess Sakura and is the only one in this tournament allowed to use magic." A few men groaned, and Syaoran's eyes narrowed with interest. She could use magic! "To preserve her personal safety and chastity during her time alone with the men of this tournament, she has been assigned a guard to fend off unwelcome situations. Yue." A tall, youthful man with long white hair and a cold, still expression stood beside the girl. She smiled at him, a smile that shed sunlight, but he did not return it.

Her chastity would be fine in the presence of a man so untouched by her beauty, Syaoran decided, feeling somewhat acerbic because the man's lack of response had made the girl wilt slightly. There was something powerful around that man, and he was doubly confused because he couldn't understand why the man would not smile in the face of such a sweet girl. It went against all the laws of human nature.

"The rules," the royal messenger told them, "will be given to you tonight at dinner. Please go and train hard."

"Right!" the champion cried, and with a jubilant bounce she led the way to the field where they could spread out and perhaps spar a little. Her guard stayed close to her the whole time, but Syaoran managed to find a spot on the field near enough to see her but far enough not to bother her. Unfortunately, the distraction she provided made him tense and fumbling when trying to practice his technique, and eventually he gave up and tried to do a few stretches to relax himself.

"I thought you said you were just going to watch," a deep, accusing voice wafted over his shoulder, and Syaoran turned to look.

"Eh?" he said, blinking at the taller young man he'd met the other morning. He blushed deeply and forced himself not to glance in the direction of the champion -- who was, at that moment, making bubbles come out of her fingertips for some of the younger boys. This young man managed to make him feel defensive, so his voice, when he replied, was harsher than usual. "I changed my mind."

The young man shook his head, gave him a particularly piercing angry stare, and strode over to the pretty champion girl, who stopped her bubbles on seeing his stormy expression. Syaoran watched them outright, as did many of the other men, but some of them had smirks on their faces as they saw her so easily dominated. Syaoran, however, was not amused -- not amused at all.

The dark young man started to vent, towering over the champion girl. "I hate this," he told her, and she looked very sad at his words. "I hate this whole thing -- it's inviting the greedy and the strong and the stupid to fight over Sakura, and I hate it." He was close to her, within her personal space, but her guard did nothing. And she . . . she only looked sad, not scared. That was the only thing that kept Syaoran from interfering. "I don't want her to get married."

At this, she put a soft hand on his arm. "At least I'm here to give her a say," she said, and her words seemed to hold some potent reminder for the young man, who forced his breathing to slow and stepped away.

"Right," he said, sighing. His eyes met hers and his mouth twisted. "Beat them all up."

She laughed a little, but a few of the men stepped forward at this. "Who are you to protest what the king has decreed?" the biggest of them said. When the young man only sneered and turned away, the big warrior reached out to grab his arm --

-- but he never made contact. Before his fingers even reached the sleeve of the young man's shirt, Yue, the champion's guard, caught his arm and twisted it behind his back, knocking the wind out of the warrior with a deft knee to his midsection.

"That," said Yue in a frighteningly soft voice, "is Prince Touya Kinomoto, brother to the woman you fight for. He has every right to say whatever he wishes. And you will not touch him."

Touya was able to leave the area unmolested.

Syaoran watched the others a good deal after that. He saw that the men thought that the champion wasn't any sort of a warrior but were nervous about her magic. Several of them hoped to take her down before she was able to get a spell off, but Syaoran knew from his own training that just because she had magic didn't mean that she didn't know how to fight. For himself, he hoped that she could fight. Not only because it would keep her from getting hurt by some of these overgrown thugs, but also because he could respect a woman who could fight.

He was eager -- no, desperate -- to see her in action. But all she did in training were some limbering stretches and a few harmless magic tricks for those who wanted them. She smiled at anyone who was even mildly nice to her and chattered readily to any listening ears. Syaoran listened intently -- but pretended not to.

"I really enjoy playing with my cat, Kero, but he eats too much and is going to get fat soon. I keep telling him that, but he never listens." And then she laughed and smiled up at her guard, "Isn't that right, Yue?" but he remained stoic, only glancing at her to acknowledge that he'd heard.

Then she seemed to feel Syaoran's eyes on her and turned, glancing back and meeting his gaze -- and Syaoran felt his heart speed up and his face get hot, and he swiftly got back to practicing. His movements were stiff and jerky and his palms were sweating, but he wouldn't look back at her again, not until he was sure that she'd turned back around.

He was just about to glance over and check when a soft breath against his ear made him jump. "Are you all right?" He twirled around and found himself nose-to-nose with the princess' champion. She was smiling, her eyes half-closed and a laugh playing about her lips.

Crap. He'd looked at her lips, and now he couldn't stop! Crap crap crap crap crap crap . . . "Yes," he said, and his voice was far too high even to his own ears.

"We met yesterday, didn't we? But I didn't get your name."

Her lips were right there! Moving for him, breathing on him, smiling at him! He was going to die of lack of her lips, like a starving man in front of a feast that he couldn't eat. "Li," he squeaked. "Syaoran Li."

"Li," she put her tongue around the strange name, as if tasting it. "Li," she smiled. "It's nice to meet you."

"Yes," he replied, watching her turn to leave him, then glance over her shoulder with that same impish look she'd had the day before.

"Let's be friends, okay?"

He was tomato-red and could only nod.

He was on cloud nine -- until she asked nine other men to be friends, too. Each time upset him as thoroughly as the last, and he noted each and every one of the men so that he could beat them to bloody pulps when he fought them in the tournament. It was in this way that he passed his time until lunch and then until dinner.

At dinner, the tournament rules were announced by the king himself. A tall man with a kind face, he began by apologizing for the absence of his daughter, who was ill. He assured them, though, that she sent her regards and her fond wishes for all of them -- but particularly for her honored future husband.

The most sensational rule, even more so than the presence of Sakura's Champion, was the no-kill rule. If a combatant intentionally killed their opponent, they would be disqualified and thrown out of the city in disgrace. The king was very somber when telling them this, and Syaoran was glad for the sake of the champion. If she was as fragile as she looked -- as fragile as he hoped she wasn't -- she would need the extra protection of that rule.

"There will also be no dirty tactics in this tournament -- if I find that there is cheating of any kind, a player will be disqualified. Depending on the severity of the infraction, there may be consequences.

"If anyone dares to harm Sakura's Champion outside of the tournament fights," he continued, looking so serious that his glasses flashed in warning, "they will be disqualified. The champion is a very dear friend of the royal family and rule-breakers in this matter will be dealt with in the severest of manners." He glanced at the tall, pale-haired guard nearby. "Hopefully, that will not be a problem with Yue around."

At the end of the king's speech, everyone sat and was fed, and Syaoran found his gaze inexorably pulled toward the top of the table where the champion was eating with the lords and ladies of the court. She was sitting next to the prince, he noticed, and it worried him as to whether they were close. Touya had spoken to her very informally on the field and that implied a level of intimacy between the two. But . . . perhaps they were just friends?

His instincts told him something else was going on between the champion and the prince, but he ignored his instincts, telling them to sit down and shut up.

Because he couldn't have entered a tournament to woo the prince's woman. That would be too cruel of fate.

He took the time to wonder if he would go for her even if she was the prince's woman. He was Chinese and so didn't fall under the jurisdiction of the prince of Japan. But might it cause an international incident? And if it did, would he care? He would have to find out, first, if she was worth it. And that meant getting close to her. This took him off on a whole new pattern of thoughts.

After a while, he was distracted by the man sitting beside him. He was stuffing food into a sack and trying to be secretive about it. Syaoran watched him out of the corner of his eye for a little while before saying, "Are you going to be that hungry later, or do you not plan to live through the preliminaries tomorrow?"

The man looked up at him, startled. His face was dirty and his hair was a mess, and with his face held up Syaoran could see the slightly sunken look of his cheeks that meant he was no stranger to hunger.

"I have kids," he said softly, eyes never leaving Syaoran's clean, handsome face. "My wife died a while back, and I'm not going to win, so I thought I'd . . ." Take food back to your children. Syaoran nodded, meaning he didn't have to finish the thought, and the man looked down, his hands still on the bag in his lap.

"I don't encourage stealing, as a rule, and you're very bad at it. So I'll give you a piece of advice -- I wouldn't make it a profession if I were you," Syaoran said, slipping a piece of fruit into his lap and tossing it into the man's bag so quickly that it left the man blinking in surprise.

The man smiled. "Thank you."

Syaoran only nodded and sipped from his goblet.

The charts were being drawn up after dinner to decide who would fight who in the preliminaries. The king told them that at the end of the next day, their number would be cut in half. This made a good deal of the fighters pensive, but a rare few began boasting loudly about their impending victory. Part of this had something to do with the alcohol they'd had with dinner, but Syaoran knew that most men could handle several cups more without becoming loud and obnoxious.

One of the men he recognized as the man Yue had stopped that morning. He kept casting mean glances out of the side of his eyes at the champion and her guard, and he tended to glower a little too openly at the prince.

He wasn't the only one, though. The prince had made no attempts to disguise his hatred of this whole event. In his eyes, they were not welcome in his home and on his father's grounds.

And none of them were worthy of his sister.

The champion darted around, asking names and hurrying back to lean over the chart of fighters for the morrow. Several people were working on it -- the king, prince, champion, and the girl who had called her "Cute Champion" the day before. Yue stood a little apart, but was consulted, and he occasionally offered narrow-eyed advice.

After they'd finished, they called the names and fights (which took a very long time because there were hundreds of men) and said that if anyone had been left out to come up to the table and tell them. Syaoran left with a backward glance at Sakura's Champion. She was chattering prettily with a few men who had approached the table to get their names in.

He went to bed jealous and unhappy.