A look. A smile. A hand on the small of my back, confirming that Amber is on board; an exaggerated smirk from Zidanya, a solemn nod from Sara. Our hands are already coming up when the announcer wraps up the pre-fight introductions and sends it over to the fight analysts, already in place when the horn blows and the isolation magic kicks in.

And then we all slam fists together, twice, and call out one word in unison.

“Yield!”

Space and time start collapsing pretty much immediately, but there’s nothing more than a stupefied silence from the commentariat for a long moment. There’s a vague sound, a strangled noise that has more in common with gibbering than with speech, and then the coliseum explodes in noise.

It’s utterly overwhelming. The roaring jeers of the crowd start loud—the sound isolation spells cut out once we yielded and the match ended, and there are hundreds of thousands of people up there—and get only louder as more and more people realize exactly what happened. They were expecting a good time, a nice fun bloodsport for the whole family with the exciting possibility of one of the eight of us fucking up and killing another surfacer, and they’re furious.

I know that, and I understand it, and I even understand why the coldness of Lady Sheid’s displeasure subtly floods the arena floor, and that in her case it has nothing to do with a desire for blood and risk and danger. That doesn’t make it hit any less hard. I’d made plans, thought about speeches and explanations, but under the crushing weight of their manifested anger and disappointment and frustrated hunger, everything I might say is washed away, and the noise and pressure drives me almost to my knees.

Almost, because there’s a hand under my left armpit that jerks me back up. Amber’s hand comes up under my right arm, doing the same thing more gently, and I look over to Sara in surprise.

“As to the Spark.” Sara gives me a tiny, fractional nod, and I boggle at her for a moment before I force myself to nod back at her and stand up straight. She’s not looking at me, though; she’s looking fixedly into the distance, and there’s a pressure building around her.

Her arm moves through a set of broad arcs. Her fingers twist and her hand moves, leaving five trails in the air that trace a series of glyphs, along with something else. It’s like she’s drawing a framework for runework along with the runes themselves, laid over themselves, something that hints at a complexity of magic that I’ve never even touched.

It completes, and there’s a moment where time seems to stop. I blink a few times, realizing that nothing of the sort has happened; instead, the sound has almost entirely stopped, gone from an overwhelming hammer to a whisper. Glancing around, I can see the bubble of the effect, anchored in the world at seven points by a five-pointed, asymmetrical diagram of wind and materialized concepts, and it grows a bit more and then stabilizes in the form of a hemisphere, maybe twenty or so meters in radius of blissful near-silence.

“More efficacious than expected.” Sara’s frowning, but I don’t have time to ask her about it.

“Adam, you double-dealing, ankle-cutting, in-fucking rotter!”

Rei’s party is upon us, and they look pissed.

“Void blight yer bones from t’inside, may ye grow hairy balls in yer spleen!”

They sound pissed, too.

“Magelord, why? I had looked forward to… I was anticipating… I don’t understand.”

I’m probably not processing very well, because that’s a pretty standard defense mechanism when it comes to interacting with people who are angry, and by standard I mean standard for me. Well, Tim isn’t angry; he’s despondent and looks like he’s so upset he’s going to break into tears or rip a hole into reality to end the universe, which isn’t much more comfortable. I look at Knives instead, raising an eyebrow at him. Unlike Rei and Stella, his weapons are sheathed, and there’s no anger that I can see on his face, not that I’m certain to be reading him right. Instead, there’s an odd little smile, one I hadn’t seen on him at our luncheon, gentle against the scars.

He shrugs and taps first the side of his neck and then his forehead twice with the index and middle fingers on his left hand, and Amber snickers audibly.

“If I understand him, my lord, he’s saying that you can’t have accidents in a fight you don’t have, and he quite understands why.”

“That’s the idea.” I turn my head minutely to murmur in her direction, frowning. “But why is that funny?”

“There is a cultural reference involved, and a play on words.” Her voice is pitched as low as mine. “I will explain it to you later.”

I nod at her, and then turn my attention to the incoming victors. “Congratulations, Rei.” I project my voice, doing my best to smile at him. “You won. First place! I’m given to understand that the rewards will—”

“You shame me in front of my family!” Rei cuts me off angrily, arms wide, eyes dilated. “You shame me in front of my retainers, in front of the Gods, and you bandy about naming me as a blood-brother, a sibling in the very battle you spurn?”

“Lord Mayor, you won. And aren’t the Gods—”

He moves faster than I can even think to react, and I don’t have any orbs up. His sword is in his hand, and he lunges across the rest of the distance.

Pain flares across a double-hand swath of my torso. I look at him, stupefied, as I stagger backwards and feel the sharp pain as I breathe in, and I can see the way that the enchantments on my new armored clothes have just shattered under Rei’s strike, bottoming out on mana and decohering into nonexistence.

By the time I’ve taken a step backwards, off balance and uncomprehending, his second strike is coming in, and Amber deflects it with a ringing TANG of metal-on-metal. There’s a blur of motion that terminates over at Stella and a TANG-TANG-TANG-WHUD as Amber turns into a blender made out of parries and then punches Rei in the chest with the hilt of her sword, and my mind finally catches up to what’s going on as everyone sort of freezes.

Tim and Sara are having a staring contest. Knives is shaking his head slowly, hands away from the hilts of his knives, eyes on me and palms facing me. Zidanya’s got a set of claws resting loosely on the string of Stella’s crossbow, and Stella’s face looks like she’s having a bad bout of indigestion.

And Amber is alive and showing no sign of pain, despite the ragged slash in her side that’s already healing up, so my breathing starts again, and I carefully don’t lose my shit, not at the suddenness of the violence or at the fact that Rei outright just tried to kill me or at how badly I must have fucked up and misjudged things.

“What the everburning fucking stars, Rei!” My voice, shaky as it is, is more of a screech than a scream and more of a scream than it is anything else.

Rei doesn’t look at me, just staring at Amber as he rubs his chest with the hand that’s carrying his short sword or dagger or whatever it is. “Ye don’t half move, girl.”

“If you are looking for satisfaction, Lord Mayor, I will not allow you to seek it from my lord.” Amber’s got an almost eerie stillness, sword—actual, physical sword—held in a low guard, the bracer on her arms flickering to life with planes of force that extend to the sides in what might effectively be a pair of shields. There’s not the slightest quaver in her voice, despite the blood soaking into and through the layers of her armor; only a quiet intensity.

Rei scoffs audibly, not taking his eyes from her, or maybe from her weapon. “I’ve tiers on you. But if ye need me t’go through ye…”

“May Kazir’s eyes be upon us; may He grant that we learn and grow, and may you find the blessing you seek.” Amber intones it with that quiet, sincere faith of hers, and I see that she’s smiling. “My lord. Bless me also?”

“Amber…” My voice breaks, and I cough, feeling the pain flare in my chest. Bruised rib, at a minimum, through the armor enchantments. “What bitrot is this?”

“The Lord Mayor feels robbed of a fight.” Amber’s eyes don’t leave Rei as she says it, and he, in turn, inclines his head to the side marginally. “Bless me, that I might serve his needs?”

“Robbed of a…” I take in a deep breath, heedless of the spike of pain, then let it half out. “I don’t understand.” The set of her shoulders shifts, her hips shifting minutely as they do, and I flush a little, watching her, in shameful gratitude among other things. It’s my ever-ready Paladin who just saved my life, it’s her readiness to do violence that intervened when I’d otherwise have a sword through my chest. “I don’t need to understand, right? I tried, as the Void Between is my witness, I tried.

“Amber. Dame Ashborn.” She’s a knight, like something out of the false memories of our past, the romanticized non-history. She loves battle in a way I never have and never will, in a way that’s anathema to the Fleet, and I love her despite it, so there’s nothing for it; and besides, nothing about my principles says Rei gets to hit me.

I tried. There’s no purpose to the heat of shame or the anger when it doesn’t go my way. There’s only moving forwards, harm mitigation, and better planning next time. And it doesn’t help my attempt at equanimity that the crowd is roaring for blood, shifting from their derision and anger back to hunger for the duel.

“If they want a show, give them one; but don’t you dare die on me.”

She moves, Rei moves, and a dozen orbs, the fruit of the precious seconds in which we’d been talking, pop as the situation suddenly equalizes on them.

Without the enchantments in Rei’s gear, he still moves faster than I can see. With the various boosters that are empowering Amber, she’s moving about that fast, too, and at first there’s just a series of clinktink noises followed by a resounding set of CTANG sounds as, I vaguely infer, they try each other’s defenses and then start engaging in earnest.

Then everything slows down, like there’s an arena bubble just around the two of them, and I can see what’s happening again.

They’re oddly matched, Amber with her single two-handed sword and forearm shield-panes and Rei with his paired swords, one long and one short, each much narrower than her sword but made of denser metal. Their styles are wildly different, too, Amber moving in smooth curves where every motion flows into the next motion with stunning beauty and grace while Rei moves with a brevity and economy of motion that looks almost offensively abrupt, the only flourish being an occasional stamp of his foot onto the ground a bit harder than necessary.

Even with any magical empowerment he had stripped away from him, even with all of Amber’s natural boosts and my orbs, he still has the edge on her in speed, and if she has an edge on him in skill or strength, it’s a narrow one. Possibly I wouldn’t be able to tell even if it were a wide one, but presumably the fight wouldn’t be lasting past an exchange or two in that case.

And last past a few exchanges the fight certainly does.

Every move Rei makes is pure efficiency and pure lethality. Every step forward brings him into range to perform an attack, each and every one promising to strike true if Amber doesn’t intercept it. She can tell, though, when they’re feints, and she lets those pass; otherwise, she mostly shifts the base of her sword this way and that, usually parrying not with her weapon but with the wrist-shields, mirroring the minimal movements he uses.

When she strikes, it’s usually a narrow slash, and she lets go one hand or the other mid-slash to parry and deflect; and even so, Rei has time to make those strikes and still parry. They both do a fair share of dodging, minute shifts of their bodies back or to the side to let a strike pass by millimeters, but Amber does far more of it; something about the way she strikes makes it so that she can turn the strike more effectively than Rei can, leaving the narrow dodges less useful to him.

It’s a dance of sorts, the two of them putting on a show. Not consciously, but because of how evenly matched they are, all factors considered; it’s something of a stalemate for exchange after exchange, seconds mounting in the dozens. Each exchange is five, six, maybe seven strikes from Rei to one or two from Amber, and then one or the other disengages, and sometimes the other follows, while sometimes the other doesn’t, like they can tell when it’s a trap or a feigned retreat. After maybe a hundred sword-strokes, though, Amber suddenly moves, her feet shifting her forwards in a way that has her seeming to float towards her opponent, closing fast and hard in the middle of one of the exchanges.

It costs her. Rei’s sword goes through her armor and leaves a vicious slash in her shoulder and a rent in her side, and her right arm is hanging limp and useless at her side, with Rei’s short sword touching her chest where her heart lies, and I can see his muscles bunch for the thrust.

My gorge doesn’t have time to rise into my throat, and I don’t have time to cry out or marshal my magic; the time-warping magic of the arena is gripping me harder than it is my companion and the man doing his best to murder her. And then it releases, and I see them in their frieze.

Amber’s arm is unbending, rock-steady, her sword resting against the side of Rei’s neck.