Chapter the Sixteenth


She ought to have woken with a start, but in truth wakefulness crept up on her gradually like an assassin. It was cosy. It was like feeling warmth inch across her skin as the sun rose over the Hold of Arachscing, or bursting, at last, through cloud cover after a very long flight. It had been the very same the morning before. These beds were simply too comfortable, and the food in the Keep was just too good; she felt languid and lazy, laden heavy with an unfamiliar restfulness. Wan morning light filtered across her closed eyelids and painted her thoughts gold.

She couldn't remember falling asleep.

She couldn't remember going to bed.

She could only recall -

Sepideh sat up, startled.

It was much to Naoise's alarm that she did: the chevalier had been pulling open the curtains to let day flood the room. He turned towards her, as though to ask for what she moved with such urgency. She saw his face, unblemished and tan and whole.

Whole.

She felt her expression fall open for a second – nothing could have frightened him more, she saw the look that flitted across his eyes – and then she ripped back her blankets and brushed past his attempts to offer her slippers or tea. "Robe," she snapped, "robe," and when he found it at last in her trunk she tore it from his hands. Her fingers touched his – found that they were warm, warm and alive – and practically raced from the room, an acrid rage building in her chest.

Hers was a cold fury, and it chased her down the spiral stairs to the mezzanine below.

She came to the door of the chamber that took up the whole of this floor, and though she startled again when she looked inside, it was a imperceptible shock, flitting and brief.

"Where is he, Santora?"

Santora rose slowly from where she had been kneeling on the floor, and took in Sepideh's expression. "Oh," said the chevalier. "This bodes quite ill."

Sepideh strode barefoot into the room. "Still abed?"

"Probably not anymore."

The House of the First liked to boast of their skill and devotion of their chevaliers, but on this occasion Santora knew her own limitations: with hands raised, she stood aside and allowed the dragonrider to stalk into the bedroom of her charge, who by this point was risen, and was dressed, and looked a little taken aback that Sepideh had come to him in a dressing-gown rather than in her armor. It mattered little enough to her; she cast a long shadow in either.

It was a shame to find him awake. She had been half-intent on smothering him with a pillow. She snarled, "what are you playing at?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"Do not," said Sepideh, "toy. Not after that. Not after what you - "

Ezust shook his head and cast a foreboding look over Sepideh's shoulder that stopped her next words in her mouth. Naoise had followed her at quick pace; he had his sword half-drawn, the hilt resting in his hand, though he, too, had not put on his shoes. She could not look at him. Santora peered around his shoulder, as though curious to see if her scion still drew breath, and seemed rather disappointed to find he did.

"Wait for me outside," Sepideh ordered, and Naoise obeyed – he would, wouldn't he, make a great show of obedience thus? - and withdrew, and Santora, with a meaningful look at Ezust, closed the door so that the two scions were in some semblance of aloneness. As alone as one could be, when the echoes floated so very high in this room, and repeated back to them over and again, a chorus of unseen companions.

Ezust said, "I told you."

It came back to her three times, in different wavering tones. Told you. I told you! Told you...

"Dreams?" said Sepideh, derisively. "Wakíŋyaŋ was right – your House's creativity is rather lacking."

"Not dreams," said Ezust. He crossed the room to a sideboard, where Santora – it must have been Santora; they were permitted no other servants here – had laid out a collection of crystal glasses and a carafe of warm – not hot – red tea. He poured himself a glass, after Sepideh had declined with a dismissive curl of her lip. "Not as far as I know. I told you. This is the first challenge of the Selection."

"And what is," said Sepideh. She could still remember the warmth of Naoise's innards on her fingertips. "This?"

"I cannot say." Ezust curled both hands around the glass, and managed an approximation of regret before his usual insouciance crept through. He had slept in his clothes, by the look of it, and his hair was flattened against his skull in a manner that made him look all the younger than he was. "You know that. We are meant to figure it out for ourselves. That is the challenge."

"Yes," said Sepideh impatiently, "yes, indeed, whatever, but what did Syya tell you?"

There: he managed a better approximation of regret that time. He was practically rueful. "My sister is more honest than I."

"Is he a–... this isn't necromancy?" She stumbled over her words despite herself, and cursed herself for it. She dug fresh crescents into the palm of her hands, twisting her fingers over one another in deep thought. The rest of the day before was filtering through to the forefront of her mind, none of it good: it had been embarrassing, to kneel like that, to try to put Naoise's skull back together with her bare hands, to lose all blood from her face and retch, emptily, into the grass at the edge of the courtyard. She regretted it now, if that was to be an impermanent world, if she had shaken for nothing and no one. "That would be the simplest, would it not? To wrench him back from the beyond, stuff him into a warm body..."

His hands had been warm.

"This is not death magic," said Ezust. "Quite the opposite, I would wager, if my sister had anything to say about it."

"You know," said Sepideh, irritatedly, "I don't follow the various disciplines. Dragons are simpler than all that."

"Life." He pronounced it crisply. "Life."

He sipped his tea.

"...right," said Sepideh. She still held herself like a woman half-possessed. She wasn't sure if any of this had been real. "What does that mean for us?"

"Let's go down to the courtyard," said Ezust. "Let's find out."


No one was looking at Naoise, until everyone was looking at Naoise. When they descended the marble steps to the antehall, through whose wide doors they were admitted to the square of ground on which Ezust had decided to arrange his duels, Naoise found that scions all were fixed to the sight of them. He flinched from it; no one hissed something in his ear about duty.

It was a blue day that was going to be bluer. The open sky put a chill down his spine, as ever it did.

Santora clapped him on the shoulder. In this half-light of burgeoning day, her hair looked more grey than blonde.

"Do what you should," she said, amicably, "do what you must, and we'll drink well afterwards."

She was dead less than ten minutes later. Innadhor-Dynin's sword had crushed her head in. She had moved with a hesitation that Naoise had never seen in her before; she had moved with a kind of syrup-slow strike that would have got her killed ten years before now. The chevalier from Seventh had almost an easy time of it. Ezust had walked over and slit her throat to make a quick job of it, looked irritated. No one had screamed, though Lilitu had gasped, and Nimue had let out an audible exclamation that had no words in it, and Vahakn had leapt from his seat as though shocked, and Mikula put his hands to his mouth and stared, and Seventh –

"Dhori. Look at me. Are you alright? Sit down. Give me your sword. It's okay."

There was no sign of Eighth.

Nedola strode across the floor, seemingly ignorant of Ezust's presence hanging over her like a gallows. She knelt, and closed Santora's eyes with the gentlest touch of her long, pale fingers. There was something deliciously business-like about the way she conducted this brusque ceremony. She seemed to carry no grief or surprise in her. Naoise would bear it for the two of them.

Santora's corpse on the floor left a long streak of blood in its wake and Ezust alone in the world, alone in this Selection, alone in the courtyard with his chev's blood between his fingers.

No one said that this was a death-knell for Sepideh as well.

"Well, then," said Ezust, "who is next?"

Naoise looked at her – Her – and found that she was not about to protest, as he had thought she might, as she should, as she might have once. Santora was dead. What was this game they were all playing? He hated them. He hated them all.

Wakíŋyaŋ said, "Naoise and Tawi next."

There was an awful seed of joy in his voice.

"No," said Sepideh. Her voice was barbed. Naoise stayed his hand upon his sword. He sought out no one in the crowd of scions. One flesh, one end.

Ezust rolled his eyes. "Arachscing."

She turned her thorned eyes on him. "What of it?"

He stared at her, and seemed unable to summon an answer.

Nimue said, searchingly, "why do we need to do it again?"

A good question. Santora was dead. Didn't that adequately fill the coffers of misery for the day?

"This," said Ezust, in a tone which suggested he found himself eminently reasonable, "is the first challenge."

"That," said Bahram, in abject frustration, "doesn't mean anything."

The scions exchanged looks that suggested it did.

Naoise glanced at Tawi. She was standing beside her scion, swinging her axe back and forth as though testing the weight of it. She looked bored. She looked too bored to be bored. He murmured a quick question: "avile ko-git?"

Are you good?

She smiled and curled her hand in a crescent around her eye in the Mkhedari riding symbol for okay. Her war paint had been applied hastily that morning. It was imprecise around her mouth. She looked tired. She looked like the chevalier's carcass in front of them was as much interest to her as a stone's slow weathering beneath a patient rain.

Lilitu looked between them. There was a certain disgust in her eyes when she regarded Tawi; it faded, but did not disappear, when she moved her gaze to Naoise.

He cared not. It was only fair.

"To death again?" Vahakn said. "What more can that tell you?"

"A confirmation only," said Ezust, "only clinch a theory-"

"To first touch," said Sepideh, and the other scions fell silent in appreciation at the strength in her voice. "To first touch, if the Selection demands it."

Tawi looked to Lilitu for her consent, which Lilitu granted. Everyone and no one was watching Naoise, even as Tawi alone made her way into the centre of the courtyard. Naoise followed her there, feeling cold and warm at once. Tawi had browned her boots by stepping into Santora's blood. She left little drips and drops of it wherever she adjusted her stance.

The scions watched them with detachment. It was like they were behind a pane of stained glass, Tawi and Naoise their martyrs-in-the-making. He leaned in towards Tawi, and murmured a few words in Mkhedari. "Khvune pezh-at?"

Tawi smiled, though it wasn't apparent to Naoise whether it was in response to his question or the inequality of the fight before them. She hefted her axe in her hand, and replied with two long steps back away from him to buy herself room to manouevre.

That was answer enough. Naoise unsheathed his black sword, and had only a moment before Tawi moved. She spun her weapon in her hand and aimed the blunt edge of the head towards Naoise's ankles, forcing him to step even further from her, outside the range of his longsword. She jerked the blade upwards, then, and brought it cutting right past his face in so intentional a miss that he knew she was mocking him.

To first touch. He waited for the axe to reach its highest arc, and then darted forward with his sword. Her guard was good around her torso, and made it impossible for him to merely jab a touch against her ribs.

Maybe this was the reason it gave him such a madcap delight to jerk the blade up when Tawi expected it least and slap the flat of it against her cheek, gently, like a master schools a careless student.

Her eyes widened, and a soundless laugh burst from her chest.

"There," said Nimue, breathlessly, "that is first touch. Call it."

"Only their scions," said Ezust, "may bid them cease."

Lilitu spoke immediately. "That's enough, Tawi."

Her voice was brittle. Naoise could not imagine what had aroused such fear in her sinews: he and Tawi had been exaggerated in their care not to draw blood.

But Tawi relented. She stepped back, and dropped her axe to the floor. It clanged upon the cobbles, shedding sparks.

Sepideh was staring at Naoise with an intensity that made him want to hide. But where could one hide, beneath such an open sky?

"Breakfast," said Nimue. "Time for breakfast, I think."