“You remember how it is,” Ruc replied. “Sometimes you just know.”
The huge woman nodded as she considered me a moment longer, ran her eyes over the crowd, nodded to herself, as though she’d come to a decision, then turned back to me.
“You got a name?”
I nodded. “Perra.”
“All right, then, Perra. What’s your price?”
I hadn’t considered this. Violence, for the priestess of Ananshael, is a form of devotion. Our order accepts contracts, of course, sums of thousands to kill important people quietly, thoroughly. Whatever I’d been thinking of, however, when I first stepped toward that pit, it hadn’t been money. Still, it would look strange—even stranger than it already looked—if I didn’t ask for anything.
“Ten suns,” I said. “If I win, they’re mine.”
“And just on the vanishingly small chance that you don’t win?” Ruc asked. His face was still, sober, but I could hear the smirk in his voice.
“Where I was raised, a woman doesn’t get paid for losing.”
Looking back, sometimes I think the difference between being a woman of fifty and a girl of nineteen is half a heartbeat. Or, to be more precise, thousands of half heartbeats, millions of them, inserted between each hot impulse and the action that follows, just a sliver of calm consideration. It is an entirely reasonable amount of time, although for me, for quite a few years, that moment for reflection and reevaluation proved stubbornly elusive. And so here again, standing in front of hundreds of people, I’d said something very, very stupid.
Nayat snorted. “And where, exactly, were you raised?”
Ruc just lifted his eyebrows, patiently waiting for the response.
I shook my head, though half the damage was already done. Hot blood flushed my cheeks.
“I’m not going to win any coin if we spend the whole night talking.”
“I’d wager,” Nayat replied, “that you’re not going to win any coin either way, but you want to fight, he wants to fight. They,” she went on, gesturing toward the restive crowd, “want you to fight. I’m not gonna get in the way.”
I don’t remember actually descending the steps through the ranked benches. One moment, it seemed, I was standing on the warped boards of the first floor of Nayat’s tavern, the next I’d reached the damp dirt at the bottom of the pit. It was like standing at the center of some huge, thousand-petaled flower, each of those petals a leering human face. A score of broad lanterns hung on chains from the beams directly overhead; the light was almost sun-bright, but shifting, unreliable, so that those faces in the crowd seemed animated by something beyond their own emotion, as though their own shadows writhed unseen just below the skin.
Ruc’s face, by contrast, was still.
“So,” he said, when I reached the center of the pit. “You were following me after all.”
I started to shake my head, to try to explain the whole strange situation all over again, then stopped myself. The truth—that I’d met him by chance at Antreem’s Mass, then followed him here, then offered to fight him based on an inexplicable urge—was too strange to believe. Instead of arguing, I smiled.
“Can you blame me?”
“Not sure it’s really a question of blame.”
I cocked my head to the side. “What is the question?”
“What you’re trying to do, and how bad I need to hurt you to stop you from doing it.”
“How do you know you don’t want me to do it?”
I was aiming for coquettish, ended up hitting a little wide of petulant.
Ruc just snorted. “Call it a hunch.”
“While I enjoy,” Nayat cut in, “a pre-beating courtship dance as much as the next woman, I wonder if we might move toward the main event.”
I glanced up at the crowd once more. The bookmakers were still working in pairs taking bets, one man collecting the coin, the other jotting down names, odds, and amounts in some kind of shorthand. Those who had already made their wagers settled into the typical taunts of the bombast of bettors everywhere. From what I could hear, no one seemed to think much of my chances, which was understandable. Ruc Lan Lac had to outweigh me by forty pounds, his reach was at least a full hand longer than my own, and he was clearly no stranger to the ring.
On the other hand, he hadn’t been trained by the priestesses and priests of death.
I turned away from the crowd to meet his level stare. “I’m ready.”
“No,” Nayat said, stepping forward, “you’re not.” She waggled a finger at my legs. “You move like you’ve got some steel tucked away under those pants. I don’t mind a little death in my pit, but if you plan to kill a man—especially a good-looking fighter like Ruc—you’re going to have to do it with your fists.”
By this point, I’d waded so deep into my own idiocy that it didn’t take much to slip the twin knives from their sheaths and toss them to the dirt. That brought an angry hiss from the crowd, and a renewed round of taunts. Ruc glanced at the blades, then back at me. He shook his head.
“Why are all the interesting people the ones who are trying to kill me?”
“If I were trying to kill you,” I replied, “I would have held on to the knives.”
“It’s easy enough to kill a man without knives.”
“I’m not trying to kill you.”
“Well,” he said, shrugging, “I guess we’ll find out.”
Nayat picked up the knives, tucked them into the back of her wide leather belt, then turned to us.
“I have to say,” she began, using her show voice, “that I, for one, am very interested to see what happens next.” She gestured us forward, took me by one wrist and Ruc by the other. Her grip was even stronger than I’d expected. She looked at me, frowned, then shook her head. “Try to stay on your feet a little longer than the last asshole.”
Before I could reply, she dropped our wrists, stepped back, and Ruc was attacking.
It wasn’t what I’d expected, wasn’t at all the way he’d fought the last fight, and the surprise almost undid me. Instead of waiting, gauging the distance, looking for the counter-strike, he came at me with a snake-quick right cross. Only my thousands of hours sparring in the wide sandstone squares of Rassambur saved me. I slipped to my left, felt the punch slide by my face, fell into a roll that gave me a tiny bit of space, then came up with my hands in front of me.
Ruc grunted. “Yep, you’re a fighter. Sometimes I hate being right.”