“What can I say? I missed your smile.”
Nayat raised her bushy brows. “There are people calling you a fool. Most men would rest a week or two. Spend some of that money you just won. Have a few drinks. Find someone to fuck.”
“Sadly, I don’t get paid to fuck.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Body like yours? I think there’d be some crossover.”
Ruc cocked his head to the side. “So cross on over, Nayat. You’re the one paying. For ten golden suns, I’ll do whatever you want.”
That brought a chorus of hoots and bawdy cheers from the crowd. Nayat’s eyes narrowed. She waited until the clamor died down to respond.
“Tempting, but my patrons came for a show.”
Ruc just shrugged. “For ten golden suns, you can fuck me right here in the ring. Easier way to make the coin than letting those oxen you call men hammer me in the gut.” He shrugged out of his light cotton shirt, tossed it aside. The muscles of his back and shoulders shifted with the motion. He was lean, obviously strong, but bruises purpled his ribs, and his lower back trickled blood where something sharp had gouged out a fingernail-sized scrap of skin. “Honestly,” he went on, turning so the crowd could see him even as he spoke, “I’d welcome the change of pace.” He put a hand to his leather belt, as though to unbuckle it. The hooting from the crowd rose even higher. “I promise I’ll be gentle as a lamb with you, Nayat. I get my coin, you have your fun, and these assholes get their show. Just give the word.”
Nayat smiled that broken-toothed smile and shook her head slowly, almost regretfully, as she waited for the noise from the crowd to subside. I edged backward, putting even more space between Ruc and me. I was still hoping, at that point at least, to remain unnoticed.
“I appreciate your offer,” Nayat said finally, “and I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, but I prefer…” She looked down at her own body, raised her brows as though surprised by the size of it, the obvious strength, then nodded approvingly. “I prefer a lover with a little more heft.”
No one would call Ruc small, but Nayat was at least a hand taller, and obviously outweighed him. The man put his shrug to use once again. “Then I guess I’ll be fighting after all.”
Nayat studied him. “You could wait. Heal up. Come back in a week. People came here to see you punch, not to watch you bleed, stumble around, and fall down.”
Ruc smiled genially.
“The thing about fighting,” he said, “is that there’s usually a little bit of both.”
*
As it turned out, there was almost none of either.
Nayat had found a man even larger than she was to go up against Ruc, a scarred, broken-nosed, hump-shouldered giant with the pale skin of a Nishan or Breatan. He roared when he entered the pit, spread his arms, flexed in quick succession the muscles of his shoulders, arms, and chest, then began punching the air, running through half a dozen basic combinations. He was huge, and he was fast, but he was sloppy. He didn’t bother tucking his chin when he jabbed, and his cross—which looked vicious enough to knock a barn door off its hinges—left him badly off-balance. Men that big tend to ignore the little things. They’re used to fighting people who are too short to get inside their reach, or too weak to do much damage if they do sneak past.
Ruc was neither.
Instead of raising his own fists, he stepped forward, hands loose at his sides. He cocked his head as though gauging the distance, then stepped inside the giant’s reach. The blond beast took the bait, roared as he swung, carved an arc through empty air with his meaty fist, stumbled slightly when he didn’t hit what he expected to hit, then met Ruc’s fist, which was coming up in a quick, efficient uppercut, driven by the full force of his legs and uncoiling torso. The big man took half a step backward, extended a hand as though searching for a friend or a railing. Whatever he was looking for, he failed to find it, stood stupefied a moment, then tumbled backward to the dirt.
Ruc studied him a moment, shrugged once more, then turned his attention to his knuckles, opening and closing his fist as though testing to see that it still worked. The crowd inside Rishinira’s Rage, which had started heckling and hollering as soon as the fight began, went sickeningly silent as the blond man fell, then, when it realized the fight was over, that there would be no more entertainment, erupted. Half of them seemed to be cursing the giant for his idiocy, while half vented their fury on Ruc, who ignored them entirely. A man beside me had hurled his tankard of ale down toward the pit, and was shouting, “Rigged! Rigged!” over and over.
The blond fighter’s friends had vaulted into the ring. One was trying to help the huge man sit up, while the other stalked back and forth, alternating between glaring at Ruc and hurling insults back at the crowd. A moment later, Nayat stepped into the ring. She looked less than pleased as she raised a hand for quiet.
Slowly, reluctantly, the huge room began to fall still. The most strident voices kept on for a while, demanding a rematch, or a reckoning, or their own coin back in their hands, but Nayat just stood there waiting until they, too, gave up, if only momentarily.
“It seems,” she said, turning to Ruc, “that I was wasting my time worrying about you.”
He smiled. “You have no idea how your concern warms my heart.”
She frowned. “Maybe I should have paid you to fuck after all. We would’ve had a longer show, at least. You’ve left me with a room of deeply unsatisfied customers.”
“You pay me to fight, not to satisfy.”
“I had hoped that the two might go hand in hand.”
“I hope for a lot of things.”
Nayat raised her brows. “Do you?”
The fighter seemed to consider the question, then shook his head. “No, I guess not.” He glanced around the packed room. “You want me to fight someone else?”
“You’d do that?” Nayat asked, wrapping a thick arm around his shoulders. Standing side by side with her, he really did look small. “For me?”
Ruc shook his head, but made no move to extricate himself. “No. I’d do it for another ten suns.”