HEEL ON THE HEIR

"Step away from her," said Alden.

His voice cracked on the second word. He heard it. I watched him hear it, and set his jaw, and begin again in a deeper register, the one he used for speeches. "Step away from her, Tamsin. This ends. You've humiliated her. You've humiliated me. I will not allow you to touch another member of my House."

"She is not a member of your House."

"She will be." His eyes did not move from me. "She's my betrothed."

I raised my eyebrows.

"As of last week," said Alden. A faint color rose in his face. "The Council thought it best. It was arranged quickly."

"I'm sure it was," I said. "The Council does have a way with conveniences."

On the planks behind me, Cordelia gave a high thin sob. Alden's eyes flickered toward her. For one instant something went across his face that was not performance at all, a quick helpless flinch, and I remembered, absurdly, that he had been fond of her as a child, that they had played together in the Fairchild gardens, that in his curious fashion he loved her. I found, to my surprise, that I could believe it. It made no difference.

"You will pay for this," he said. "On my honor. On the honor of my House. I challenge you, here, before the Relay, to a duel of the first blood. If you are afraid—"

"I am not."

"—you may decline."

"I accept."

His mouth closed. He had expected an argument. I think he had expected a plea. He stood there, sword in hand, in the thin gray light of the marsh, and the camera crystals swung toward him in a long slow circle, and the announcer's voice, which had been struck dumb, found itself again and rose in a swelling cry.

"A DUEL! Ladies and gentlemen, we are witness to a DUEL! Heir Whitlock, Silver-rank, against the Free Entrant Reeve, Bronze, in the Marsh of Mirrors..."

I walked away from Cordelia, and onto a broad flat tract of mud beside the dike, and drew Ashbrand.

…

I had thought about this moment for five years, in one fashion or another. I had imagined it a thousand ways. I had imagined myself weeping, begging, laughing. In the worst version I won, and felt nothing, and woke up the next morning in the same cold room.

What I had not imagined was how little it would matter.

He was good. I will say that for him. Alden Whitlock was a trained swordsman of the Silver rank, taught from childhood by the best masters in the capital, and the sword in his hand was a work of art: a long thin blade of ley-steel, etched with gold, singing faintly. His stance was flawless. His breathing was even. The light along his edge shimmered with a brilliant, controlled radiance.

And I knew, with a grim and complete certainty, that I could take him in four moves.

I knew it because I knew him. I knew the three techniques of House Whitlock because I had practiced them with him, every Thursday afternoon for three years, in the garden behind the townhouse, in a white dress, with a wooden sword. I had corrected his stance. I had adjusted his grip. In the evenings I had sat up with his books, and the books of his father, and the old Whitlock manuals in the family vault, to find why his Lightning Lance was always a hair slow, why his Aegis flickered, why his Hammer would not strike true.

I had never told him. I had thought: he'll find it himself. I had thought it was love.

I breathed in. I breathed out. I held the sword in a low guard, point down, and said, in the clear voice of a woman making conversation:

"Whenever you're ready."

…

He came on with Lightning Lance.

It was the first of the three. He swept the sword up, a ribbon of white fire gathered along the edge, and thrust with all his weight behind it. The blade extended, the light shooting forward in a long narrow spear of crackling force, thirty feet, forty, aimed at my breast. It was a pretty thing. It was meant to be. Millions would see it.

I did not dodge.

I raised Ashbrand, edge forward, and met the Lance with the tip.

The Cinder ran up the blade. It caught the front of the lightning where it struck the steel. I felt it in my arm, like a hot wire. The spear of fire did not stop; it unspooled. The light ran backward along its own length, strand by strand, unthreading itself, and where it unthreaded, the lattice of intent that held it fell apart. The Lance shrank. The crackle died. By the time it reached me it was no more than a handful of sparks, which drifted down onto my sleeve and went out.

I let them.

"That," I said, "is a Lightning Lance. It is held together by a triple-woven focusing rune at the root. The root is a quarter-inch off-center, which is why it flickers. Your father's master never taught the correction." I tilted my head. "I could have shown you. You never asked."

Alden stared at me.

He did not understand. I saw him not understand. His face had gone slack with shock, and under it, very slowly, something else was coming: a chill, uneasy suspicion, like a man who feels a draft in a room that he thought was sealed.

"Golden Aegis," he said hoarsely.

He raised his left hand. A shimmering gold disc spread before him, shoulder-high, a circular shield of radiance. It was, for its type, magnificent. It was the second technique, and the one he was proudest of. I had seen it stop a cannonball.

I stepped forward.

I walked up to it, calmly, three paces, four, and laid my left palm against its surface.

"There you are," I said, to the Cinder.

The gold went dark.

It went out from the center, in a widening ring, like the iris of an eye closing, and the Aegis came apart in my hand. It was beautifully made, as I said. It was a lattice of eleven interlocking rings, each one reinforcing the next, a masterpiece of defensive craft. But the heart of it was a knot, and the knot was a single weak point, a place where five lines converged, and I put my thumb on the knot and burned it.

The shield fell to pieces. Gold glitter drifted down like snow.

I was standing three feet from him.

He swung.

…

I will say this: he was fast. Faster than I had expected. The sword came across in a short vicious arc, edged with white fire, and I barely got Ashbrand up in time. The two blades met with a scream of metal. His had the better steel. Mine had the better magic. The blow knocked me back two steps, and I felt my wrist go numb.

"You think you're so clever," he panted. His eyes were wide, wet, desperate. "You think—you can—you're nothing, you're a scholarship girl—"

"Yes," I said.

"You were nothing!"

"Yes."

He swung again. I parried. He swung again. I gave ground. He was a good swordsman, and he had the weight of an entire House behind him, and for ten seconds, perhaps twelve, I did nothing but defend. The camera crystals closed in. The announcer's voice rose to a shriek. Somewhere in the stadium a hundred and fifty thousand people were on their feet.

He threw the Whitlock Hammer.

It was the third technique, and the most dangerous. It was not a spell, strictly; it was a discipline. A man gathered all his weight in a single stroke and drove it down, and the blade became a hammer, and the force went through whatever it struck. It had broken Marshal's armor. It had split walls.

He raised his sword high over his head in both hands. He roared. He brought it down.

I saw it come. I saw every angle of it, as I'd seen it a thousand times on Thursday afternoons in a garden with a wooden sword. I saw the tiny hitch in his left hip, the way his right shoulder dropped. It was exactly as it had been. It was exactly as I'd tried to correct, years ago, in vain.

I did not parry.

I stepped in under the sword, and past it, and as the blade came down I rapped the flat of Ashbrand across his wrists. Hard. The Hammer's force, unbalanced, drove the blade into the mud at his own feet. It sank to the hilt. He staggered. I swung Ashbrand around in a low flat circle and caught him across the ribs, and the Cinder went into his armor.

His enchanted breastplate was beautiful work. It cost, I knew, eleven hundred dollars. It was a lattice of four hundred small wards, all of which held. I had no quarrel with the wards. I merely burned the one at the base of the spine, which carried the load of the rest.

The whole breastplate sagged. It went from gleaming gold to dull gray in a breath. Its straps snapped. It fell off him in two pieces and lay in the mud.

Alden, in his shirt, took a step back, and his foot caught on the hilt of his own sword.

He went down.

…

I stood over him.

The marsh was very quiet. A little wind moved the reeds. The gray light lay on the mud and on the spilled gold of his hair. He was on his back with his hands up, his chest heaving, and for a moment, looking up at me, he looked about fifteen years old.

I put my foot on his face.

I did it gently. I did it, in a sense, with care. I set the heel of my boot against his cheek, and turned his head to the side, and pressed his face down into the black mud of the Marsh of Mirrors, and held it there.

He made a muffled noise. His hands scrabbled at my ankle. I did not give.

"Do you know," I said, conversationally, "what the Heart does, Alden? I should like to tell you, since you were so very interested in it."

He said something. It was drowned in mud.

"It eats structure," I said. "Everything. Every wall. Every ward. Every promise a clever person ever made. It finds the part that holds the rest, and it takes it away." I increased the pressure by a hair. "I have been thinking about you for several months. I have been trying to find the part of you that holds the rest."

He struggled. I waited.

"I have not found it," I said. "I am beginning to wonder if there is one."

…

I will tell you what I saw when I raised my head.

The camera crystals were all around me, a ring of them, red-lit, bright. Beyond them, over the dead cypresses, the Glass Relay sphere had descended to forty feet, enormous, shimmering, and every face of it showed the same thing: a girl in a gray coat with her foot on the head of the heir of House Whitlock. In the broadcast, I later saw, it looked like a statue. I looked, I think, like an executioner.

And all around, in the tiers of the Colosseum a mile above, in the parlors of the Republic, in every taproom from the Redwater to the port, people had stopped speaking. The silence was so vast that it came down through the ceiling of the Greenwood as a pressure in the ears.

Then the stadium erupted.

I have never heard anything like it. It began as a single shout and became, in an instant, a roar, a wave, a howl that shook the dead cypress and rippled the pools. It was not applause. It was something closer to a scream, of shock, of delight, of savage joy, of a hundred and fifty thousand people witnessing a story told with all the gloves off. The Relay's hash-mark flared across the sky in letters of fire. #WHOISSHE had burned out. In its place, new:

#HEELONTHEHEIR.

I did not look at the sphere. I looked up, instead, past it, to the Senate box, a gilded balcony at the north end of the arena, hanging over the sand.

The Chancellor was standing at the rail.

I could see him quite clearly in the light of the Relay. His plain black coat. His silver hair. His folded hands. He was not clapping, like the others. He was not frowning. His face was entirely smooth, as it had been the first day. He was looking at me, and at the Relay, and at the dead flat blaze of ash that had once been Cordelia Fairchild's spells.

His lips moved. No one heard what he said.

"He has just made a decision," murmured the Shade at my shoulder. "I do not know which. But you have, with great artistry, converted him from a man who wished to take you quietly into a man who must kill you in public."

"I expected that."

"Did you?"

"I expected it would cost something." I looked down at Alden, who had gone limp, breathing in shallow gasps through mud. "What I did not expect was how little I'd feel."

"Hm." A silence. "That is the second time you have said that today."

"Is it a bad sign?"

"I have not decided." The pale eyes were thoughtful. "You have just created a man with power, a grudge, and nothing left to lose. I would call it a poor trade. But I will say this." The corner of his mouth moved. "It was a very good show."

…

I lifted my foot from Alden's head.

He did not rise. He lay in the mud, face down, breathing, his hair filthy, his hands curled. Somewhere behind me I heard Cordelia sobbing, and a pair of Marshals splashing across the planks to haul her away. The announcer was babbling. The crowd was a storm.

I took a step back. I wiped my boot on the grass. I sheathed Ashbrand. And then, because the Relay was still bright, and the cameras were still turning, and every person in the Republic who had ever been told that their lives were small and their futures fixed was holding their breath, I raised my voice.

It was not loud. I had learned that. A loud voice makes a person turn away. A quiet voice, pitched right, makes a stadium lean in.

"My name is Tamsin Reeve," I said.

The silence was total.

"I am a Free Entrant. I have no House. I have no patron. I have no friends in the Senate, and I have never in my life asked for a thing that was not mine." I looked up at the Senate box, at the plain black figure at the rail. "Five months ago, certain people took from me what I owed to no one. They told me that I would be safer if I gave it up. I declined."

I let it hang.

"I will be returning for the rest," I said.

I turned, and walked away across the marsh.