THE FOUNDERS” GAUNTLET BEGINS

The conversation with Alden lasted eleven minutes, and I remember almost none of it.

He said he was sorry. He said he had been a fool. He said that the engagement had been the Council's idea and that he had never wanted it to end in public, that I had misunderstood, that Cordelia was young and jealous, that his father was a hard man. He said the Chancellor was worried. He said they could settle the thing quietly if I would only come home. He said all of it in the warm, low voice, with his hat in his hands, and I stood in the rain and watched his mouth move and counted the men on the roof.

Six. Two with crossbows.

"You look well," he said at the end, a little desperately.

"So do you."

"Tamsin, I mean it. I never meant—"

"Yes," I said. "You did."

He fell silent.

"I would not stand under that lamp too long," I added kindly. "Your archers are getting wet."

I walked away. He did not follow. Behind me I heard him say, very softly, a word that was not my name, and the Shade's voice, dry as dust: "There. He's learned something. He has just discovered he cannot read you."

"He's only discovered he cannot sell me," I said.

…

Three weeks passed in the manner of a fever.

I trained in the cellar by day. I trained on the roofs by night. Josie stocked me with equipment from a dozen suppliers, half of whom she paid in favors and half of whom she bullied. I replaced my boots. I learned my sword. I learned a dozen uses for a coil of wire, a canteen, and a sack of salt. The Shade drilled me until my hands bled, and each night I returned to the cellar and slept for four hours on a pallet by the forge, with Nimbus's warm weight on my chest and Josie snoring in her hammock like a bear in a cave.

And then it was the morning of the Gauntlet.

…

The Ravenport Colosseum was the largest building in the Republic.

It stood on a hill above the harbor, a vast oval of pale stone, tiered and arcaded, rising ten stories above the city and seating, on a Gauntlet day, a hundred and fifty thousand. I had seen it before, from the high boxes of the Whitlocks, on the arm of a golden boy. I had never seen it from the floor.

From the floor, it was a mountain.

Two hundred of us stood in the great arena under a white sky: two hundred contestants, in a rough ring, each in the colors of our patrons, or in the plain gray of the Free list. The sand beneath our feet had been raked in great curving whorls. Around us the walls climbed, tier after tier, banner after banner, and in every tier the crowd was a roaring tapestry of faces. Banners snapped. Vendors cried. Somewhere a brass band was working through a march with dreadful vigor.

And over it all, in the center of the arena, floating thirty feet above the sand like some enormous eye, hung the Glass Relay.

It was the largest I'd ever seen: a sphere of enchanted crystal as wide as a house, shimmering with rainbows, and from it, in every direction, shone a hundred moving images. Every seat in the stadium had a view. Every parlor in the Republic would see this. The Glass Relay did not simply broadcast; it bound a thousand smaller crystals across the country into a single mirror, so that the spectacle on the sand appeared, at the same instant, on every screen from Ravenport to the Redwater.

A hundred million people. Perhaps more.

"Ladies and gentlemen!" The announcer's voice rolled from a dozen brass trumpets, rich, theatrical, a man who had been born to say these words. "Welcome, citizens of Halvern, to the Two-Hundred-and-Fourth Founders' Gauntlet!"

The roar was like a landslide.

I stood in the gray ranks of the Free list, at the back, and looked at nothing.

"Seventy-one," said the Shade, beside me. "That's how many cameras are on you now. Of the two hundred, you are the sixty-third most observed."

"How can you possibly know that?"

"They have faces for each. The ones with the brightest lights are the ones the producers expect to be interesting. You are, to my surprise, rather bright."

"I'm Free."

"You are Free, and you are a girl who made a scene before the Senate. They've spent three weeks selling your story." A pause. "I do not think you will be as invisible as you hoped."

I glanced up. Sure enough, a brass-bound crystal the size of a plate was hovering a few yards from my head, turning slowly to follow me. A red light winked on its rim.

I regarded it. It regarded me.

I looked away.

…

The First Trial of the Gauntlet was called the Greenwood.

It was, in essence, a forest. The Gauntlet's engineers had spent six months building it: an enchanted forest, ten square miles of it, planted over a cavity beneath the Colosseum floor and lit by a ceiling of artificial daylight. It was a work of horrifying beauty. There were pines two hundred feet tall. There were rivers and ravines and marshes, built to scale, with working weather. In the center rose a hill of black stone, with a flag on the summit.

The rules were simple. We had forty-eight hours. We would be released at intervals around the perimeter. We were to reach the flag. Those who did so before time ran out would pass. Those who did not would be eliminated, and conveyed by the Marshals to the surface. Those who died would be unfortunate.

The announcer had emphasized the last point. There was a pleasant ripple of laughter.

Nothing in the rules said we could not kill each other.

…

They released us at dawn.

I went into the trees at a jog. The Shade, at my shoulder, floated in the air as a thin gray ghost, scanning the way ahead. Nimbus flew overhead, in and out of the canopy, a small white streak among the green. He was not supposed to be there. Contestants were permitted a single "companion beast." I had registered him as a "pet." The Marshal had thought it funny.

The Greenwood closed over my head.

It was beautiful. I hated it. The air was warm and still and smelled of resin and moss. Light fell in long slanting shafts through the canopy, picking out ferns, fallen logs, the trembling gold of dust. Birds sang in the branches: real birds, or well-made ones. A stream ran across the path, cold and clear. Everything about it said safe.

"The first trap is forty paces ahead," said the Shade.

"I see it."

"Do you?"

"Left of the path. The ferns are too regular. They've been planted in a grid."

"Hm."

I stepped off the path, circled wide, and came up on the trap from behind. It was a pressure-plate hidden in the moss, ringed with sharpened stakes. I stepped over the plate and put the point of my sword to the nearest stake, and the Cinder ran down it, and the whole trap, rune and wire and spring, collapsed into ash. It was done in the time it took to sneeze.

I moved on.

It went like that for hours. I found a trip-wire tied to a nest of poisonous wasps; I burned the knot. I found a false bridge over a ravine; I walked around it. I found a camouflaged pit; I filled it in with a scorched tree. The Greenwood was cleverly built, and utterly impersonal. It had no malice. Its traps were the traps of an engineer who wishes to cull a field.

The other contestants were less careful.

I heard them from time to time: a scream in the distance, a thud, the roar of a collapsing tree. Once, from the canopy above me, I caught the unmistakable sound of a man falling a great distance. A shower of leaves drifted down. I did not look up.

One, I thought.

…

The first person to attack me was a boy.

He came out of a thicket at midday, a lanky, blond, nineteen-year-old in the green of House Aldrin, with a short bow in his hand and the arrogance of a person who had been told he was brilliant. He had been stalking me for some time. I had heard him a quarter mile back. I had been waiting.

"Free girl!" he called, from fifty yards. "Throw down your sword, and I'll let you go!"

I kept walking.

He loosed. The arrow came in a flat, silver arc, humming. It was a good shot. It was enchanted; I could see the shimmer of a Piercing rune on the shaft. It struck me squarely in the chest and the Cinder swallowed it, and the rune on the shaft burned out in a flash of green, and the arrow fell at my feet as a harmless stick of wood.

The boy stopped.

He stared at the arrow. He stared at me.

I did not run toward him. I did not draw. I simply continued walking, steadily, across the clearing, and watched his face change as he understood what was happening.

He dropped the bow. He backed away. He fumbled a second weapon from his belt, a Silver-etched dagger, and held it before him in both hands, as one holds a candle in the dark.

"Stay back!"

"No," I said.

"I'm warning you—"

I broke his wrist. It was done in a single motion. I took the dagger as it fell, and rapped him on the temple with the pommel. He folded onto the moss like a dropped coat, and lay still, breathing.

I looked at him. I took the dagger. I took the pouch of crystals from his belt, which was legal. And then, because I am not a monster, I dragged him by the collar to the base of a tree and propped him against the trunk, where he would be found by the elimination patrol.

"Merciful," said the Shade.

"Efficient. A dead man is a story. A sleeping boy is a footnote."

"I find I rather like you," he said, and that was all.

…

I eliminated six more before dark.

I want to be exact about it. I did not hunt. I do not like hunting. But the forest was crowded, and the other contestants were stupid, and by the second hour I had been ambushed four times. Every one of them was a House stripling with a patron's blessing and a lifetime's expectation of victory. Each one had a bag of crystals, a charm or two, and an unshakable conviction that the Free girl was the weakest target in the forest.

I disabused them. Quickly. I took them down with a wrist-snap, a pommel, a spark of Cinder through the shield. Not one was dead. Not one would hold a sword for a month. The seventh, a heavy brute in the colors of a mining House, I knocked into a stream and hauled out half-drowned, and when he coughed up the water and stared up at me with enormous eyes, I said gravely, "I'm very sorry. Please tell your friends."

The camera crystal had followed me the whole way. It hovered at the edge of my vision, patient, unblinking. I could feel the audience in it: a hundred million eyes, watching a tired girl in a gray coat do something no one had ever done in the Greenwood, which was to walk the whole of it without being touched.

Somewhere in the stadium, a commentator said my name for the first time.

I did not hear it. I heard it later, in the replay, in Josie's cellar, with a handful of the Gauntlet audience on the screen screaming themselves hoarse. Tamsin Reeve. The Free Entrant. Who is she?

A single word began to go through the crowd. It spread across the tiers like wind through grass. It lit up the Glass Relay's tally-board in blazing letters, a hash-mark and a name, and by evening it had been repeated eleven million times.

#WHOISSHE.

…

I made camp on the second night in the crook of a dead oak, forty feet above the ground, where the branches formed a natural platform. I lit no fire. I ate dried peaches and drank from my canteen and lay on my back and watched the artificial stars come out.

"Thirty-one hours left," said the Shade. "You are four miles from the flag. You could make it in two."

"I know."

"Then why have you stopped?"

"Because I want the others to arrive first."

"Hm." A pause. "Elaborate."

"I want them to see the flag. I want them to climb the hill, and stand, and realize that someone is already sitting there." I closed my eyes. "I want to be on that hill when the cameras find the last of them."

The Shade did not answer. After a while I felt, rather than saw, the faint pale shape of him settle beside me on the branch, knees drawn up, looking at the false sky.

"You have a streak of theater," he said at last.

"I got it from you."

"I have never been theatrical in my life."

"You called me a child, in chains."

"That was a statement of fact."

I smiled, in the dark.

…

I will tell you what I did not see, until the replay.

It was in the Fairchild camp, a mile to the north, in a grove of white birches. Cordelia was sitting on a camp stool before a Relay screen with a cup of tea in her gloved hand, surrounded by eleven attendants, two healers, a fashionable armorer, and an enormous quantity of silk. She was beautiful. She was exquisitely, tragically, brilliantly beautiful. She was watching an image on the screen.

It was an image of me.

I was sitting at the top of a tree, in a gray coat, eating a peach.

I watched the replay many times, afterward. I watched Cordelia's face as the camera caught her. For a long time there was nothing in it. Then she set the teacup down, very carefully, in its saucer, and the saucer rattled.

"That is her," she said.

"Miss Fairchild?" said one of the attendants.

"That is her." Her voice had gone high and thin. "She's alive. She's alive, and she's—" She stopped. The sweet brown eyes had gone flat and hard as pebbles. The mask had slipped. For a moment there was only the thing underneath it.

Then she smiled. It was the most terrible smile I have ever seen.

"Find her," said Cordelia Fairchild. "Everyone. Whatever it costs. Find her."