THE PITS

He did not carry me out.

I mention it because I had half expected him to. I had half dreaded it, in the way one dreads a gesture of kindness from a man one does not wish to owe. But Declan Marrow, once he had laid me on a bedroll and made certain I was breathing, rose, stretched, and went to look at the sky. He stood for an hour at the lip of the Gorge, in the dawn, in a borrowed coat of Hawk's that did not fit across the shoulders, and said nothing to anyone. When I woke at noon, he was sitting on the rim with his boots dangling over the edge, whittling a stick.

"Eat," he said.

"I'm not hungry."

"You have been unconscious for sixteen hours. You will eat, or I will put it down your throat." He did not look at me. "I do not make idle threats. I have not the practice."

I ate. It was cold bacon and hard bread, and it was the finest meal of my life.

For three days I did nothing but sleep, and eat, and lie on my back in Hawk's loft. Hawk came and went with bowls of broth and a growing air of satisfaction. Nimbus lay on my chest, purring, and grew perceptibly each hour. And the Warlord of the Iron March, who had not seen a sunrise in forty years, spent every one of those days on the roof of the shop, with his face turned east, as a plant leans toward the light.

On the fourth day I got up. On the fifth, he came to find me.

"You are fit," he said.

"I am recovering."

"You are fit enough to be shown something." He leaned in the loft door, with his arms folded. In the daylight he was even larger than I had thought. His head nearly touched the beam. His hair was tied back with a bootlace. The scars, visible now on his arms and throat, were white against his tan: a hundred of them, narrow, curved, old. "Dress. Wear the coat. Bring the sword."

"Where are we going?"

"To learn what you are not."

…

The Iron Pits lay twelve miles east of Redwater Junction, in a bowl of dry hills, and they were not on any map.

I knew the place by reputation. Every Frontier child did. The Pits were the underground circuit, the unlicensed arenas where the men and women of the Frontier fought for coin and glory and the pleasure of the crowd. There were no rules there, no Marshals, no Relay. A door in a hillside, a ladder into the dark, a roar of voices rising from below. The best of the fighters got rich. The worst got buried. The rest drifted on, scarred, to the next camp.

Declan led me down the ladder.

I had expected a cave. It was a cathedral. A great circular chamber had been cut from the living rock, forty feet deep, with a floor of beaten earth in the center and a ring of benches rising in tiers to a vaulted ceiling hung with smoking oil lamps. The air was thick with smoke and sweat and the stink of spilled beer. Every bench was full. Two thousand people, I judged, jammed shoulder to shoulder: miners, cowhands, railmen, bounty hunters, gamblers, whores. Their faces were red and wet. Their voices were a single continuous animal roar.

In the pit, two men were killing each other with axes.

I watched for a minute. It was ugly. It was also, I noted, quite skillful. One was a squat bald man in a leather apron, the other a lean red-bearded giant; they circled, cut, bled. When the giant went down with a split skull, the crowd screamed with delight. A pair of attendants dragged the body away by the heels. A boy ran out with a bucket of sand and scattered it over the stain.

"Welcome," said Declan, "to the Frontier."

He found a place for us on a high bench, at the back. A woman with a tray of tin cups pushed her way up the aisle. He bought two. He handed one to me, and I sniffed it. It was whiskey, thin, raw, the color of tea.

"What is it you wish me to learn?"

"You are a magnificent fighter," said Declan. "Within the rules."

"There are no rules in the Gauntlet."

"There are always rules. They are merely unwritten." He drank. "You fight like a person who has been taught. You prepare. You study. You find the weakness in the structure and you burn it. It is very effective. It will carry you to the finals." He looked down at the pit. "It will not carry you through the Chancellor."

"No?"

"No. The Chancellor does not fight with structures." He set down his cup. "He fights with people. With ten thousand of them. With a hundred thousand. He draws on them like a battery. You cannot burn a structure that is spread over a nation."

I watched the crowd. They were roaring again; another pair had entered the ring.

"So I must learn to fight a man."

"You must learn to fight a thing that will not let you think." The gray eyes were cold. "Panic. Exhaustion. Rage. Pain. A fight where the structure is gone, and you have nothing left but the animal. That is what the Pits will teach you." A pause. "I am going to put you in."

"Now?"

"This evening."

"Against whom?"

"Whoever is next."

I looked at him. He looked back, without humor, without apology.

"You said you do not protect me," he said. "I am merely holding to the agreement."

…

They gave me a number and a name. The number was nineteen. The name was the Girl.

"You'll fight three," said the pit-boss, a one-eyed woman in a man's waistcoat, with a ledger and a cheroot. She did not look up. "Gold-low, all of them. No quarter, no pause. You fall, you lose. You yield, you lose. You die, you lose." She wrote. "Purse is two hundred if you win. The house keeps ten percent. Any questions?"

"No."

"Good. Then take off the coat."

"No."

"It's a rule."

"It is not a rule. It's a preference." I met her single eye. "Take it up with the gentleman."

The pit-boss glanced past me. Declan Marrow was leaning on the wall behind me, with his arms folded. He had not spoken. He did not need to. She looked at him for about three seconds. Then she looked at her ledger again.

"Keep the coat," she said.

…

The first was a mountain of a man named Gravel.

He was seven feet tall, I think, and as wide as a door. He was bare to the waist, with a body like a boulder wrapped in rope. His Gold Sigil blazed across his chest, a crude rough thing, the mark of a man who had come up fast and ugly. In each hand he held a spiked iron club. When he entered the ring, the crowd rose to its feet and roared his name.

"Gravel! Gravel! Gravel!"

I walked out in the gray coat with Ashbrand at my hip. I did not hear the crowd. I did not hear the shouting. The roar fell away. I walked to the center of the pit and stood on the beaten earth, and breathed, and watched him come.

He swung.

I did not parry. I turned my body, and the club went past my ear with a wind like a freight train, and sank into the earth where my head had been. I stepped inside. I put my elbow into his ribs. It was like hitting a wall. He grunted, and swept his other club around, and I ducked under it and cut him across the thigh. He roared. He kicked.

It was a different kind of fight.

There was no structure to burn. He was a brute, a hammer, a thing of muscle and weight and rage. He wore no wards. He carried no spells. He had a Sigil, but he used it only to make himself stronger and faster and harder to wound. I could not take it apart. I had to fight him.

I got hit. I got hit three times. Once in the ribs, where the club glanced and cracked something. Once on the shoulder. Once across the thigh, a numbing blow that nearly dropped me. I tasted blood. I felt the old animal terror rise in my chest, cold and slick, and I clamped down on it, and kept my eyes on his knees.

"Never watch the weapon," I heard Declan say, in my head, in a voice from a year ago. "Watch the hips."

I watched his hips.

When he lunged I stepped into it. I put Ashbrand's pommel into his throat. He gagged. His club dropped. I swept his legs. He went down like a tree, with a crash that shook the benches. I knelt on his chest with the point of the blade at his eye, and he lay there, wheezing, staring up at me, with the fight gone out of him.

"Yield," I said.

He yielded.

The crowd was on its feet. They were screaming a new name. I did not listen.

…

The second was a woman.

She was small and fast and silent, with her hair cropped to the skull and a pair of curved knives that she twirled between her fingers like a juggler. She danced round me for a full minute. She cut me eleven times. She did not fight like a human being. She fought like a flame, flickering, shifting, never where I expected her. The blood ran from my forearms and my cheek. The edges of my vision began to gray.

I lost my temper. That was the trouble. I had not lost it in a year, and I had forgotten how it felt: a hot black tide, rising behind the eyes. I threw out the Field, without thinking, a ring of scarlet heat, and the woman danced back, hissing, and I realized that she wore no enchantment, no ward, nothing. The Field had nothing to burn. It was a waste.

"Control it," said Declan, from a long way off.

I pulled it in. I stood very still, bleeding, in the middle of the ring, and let the red tide ebb. I closed my eyes. When I opened them, the woman was coming at me with both knives high, and I saw her.

I saw the pattern. Not the spell. The rhythm. She was fast, but she was not random. She moved in threes: feint, feint, cut. I counted. One, two, cut. I stepped aside, and her blade cut empty air, and I brought Ashbrand down on her wrist. She gasped. The knife fell. I swung the flat of the blade against her temple, and she crumpled.

I stood there, panting, in a pool of lamplight, with the crowd screaming my number.

The third took twenty minutes.

…

I do not remember his name. I remember that he was a Gold of the middle rank, with a thick black beard and a long curved sword, and that he fought with the stony patience of a veteran. He did not hurry. He did not waste a movement. He took the measure of me in the first thirty seconds, and he did not make a mistake.

I was exhausted. I was bleeding from a dozen places. My left arm hung nearly useless. The Cinder in my veins had thinned to a thread. I could feel the pit swaying under me. I could hear my own breath, rattling, like a stranger's.

I lost the sword.

He disarmed me neatly, with a flick of the wrist, and Ashbrand spun away across the earth. I stood there, empty-handed, with the point of his blade at my throat. The crowd howled. Somewhere, a man was laughing.

I'm going to die, I thought. It was a flat, cool, almost interested thought. In a hole in the ground. Of all the places.

Get up, said the thin precise voice at the back of my head.

I did not.

I stood there, and looked at the man's face, and at the long curved blade. And I did the one thing in the world that I had not been taught. I stopped trying to win.

I let go of the fear. I let go of the pain. I let go of the long ledger of everything I owed, and everything I had been, and everything I meant to do. I let go of the plan. I let go of the Gauntlet and the Chancellor and the Houses. What was left, when it was all stripped away, was very small, and very bright. It was a girl standing in the dirt, with her hands empty, looking at a man with a sword.

I stepped forward.

The point of his blade pricked my throat. I felt a drop of blood run down my collarbone. I put my left hand on his wrist. I took one more step. His eyes went wide. He tried to pull back. I held him there, close, in the circle of my arm, and I laid my right palm flat on his chest.

I said, quietly, "I am sorry."

And I let the Cinder go.

It was not a field. It was not a blade. It was a single pulse of heat, direct, intimate, from palm to breastbone. It went through his armor. It went through his ribs. It found the Gold Sigil, glowing there like a coal, and it did not burn it. It simply quieted it. The Sigil flickered, and sank, and went dark.

The man's sword dropped.

He stood there, swaying, staring down at his own chest. His mouth opened. His face went slack. Then his knees buckled, and he sat down heavily in the dust, with his hands in his lap, like a child.

I stood over him. I could not feel my legs.

The Pit was silent.

I looked at the ring of faces rising in the smoke. I looked at the pit-boss, her cheroot hanging from her lip. I looked at the benches, two thousand people motionless. Nobody moved. Nobody cheered. They looked at the girl in the gray coat, swaying in the lamplight, with blood on her collar, and the man at her feet with his Sigil gone cold.

I turned my head.

He was at the back of the pit, on the high bench, exactly where I had left him. He had not moved. He sat with his cup in his hand, motionless, watching me. I could not read his face from there. I could only feel it: that steady, heavy, unwavering regard, like the weight of the sun.

I did not look away.

Slowly, he lifted the cup. He did not smile. He did not nod. He merely raised it an inch, in the smoke, in my direction, as a man might raise a glass to an equal.

I breathed.

It was the best thing anyone had ever given me.

…

They gave me the purse at midnight, in the pit-boss's office, among the ledgers. I took it without counting. I stood in the doorway, with a rag pressed to my neck, and looked at the chamber through the haze.

He was waiting for me on the ladder.

He didn't speak. He held out a hand and I took it, because I couldn't climb. He pulled me up, rung by rung, into the cold black night and the stars. We stood at the top of the hill in the dark, and the wind blew off the plain, and I could hear the Pits roaring beneath our feet like a heart. He reached into his coat. He drew out a flask.

"Drink," said Declan.

I drank. It was brandy. It burned all the way down.

"Well?" I said. My voice was a rasp.

"Well?"

"Say it."

"Say what?"

"Whatever you're going to say. I did badly. I lost my temper. I nearly lost the sword. I can take it."

He looked at me. In the starlight, his face was carved from stone. His eyes were very bright.

"I was not going to say that," said Declan Marrow.

I waited.

"I was going to tell you," he said, "that in seventy years, I have never been so afraid."

He did not say it as a compliment. He said it as a man says the weather. But there was something in the set of his jaw, in the deep slow breath he drew, that told me what it had cost him to speak.

I thought of a hundred things I might have said.

I said nothing at all. I passed back the flask, and he drank, and the night went on around us.

Far down in the valley, along the road to the Junction, a lantern was moving: a single yellow light, bobbing on a horse. It passed our hill without stopping. A rider, going east. I would not have noticed it, but the Warlord turned his head. His eyes narrowed. His hand, I saw, had gone still on the flask.

"What is it?"

"A man at the back of the pit," he said slowly. "At the last. Gray coat. He watched you for the whole of the third fight, and when you finished, he left." He turned his face toward the road. "He wore a ring. Black stone. A Crane signet."

I felt a cold finger touch my spine.

"They know where you are," said Declan.