It will sound like an excuse, but it’s nothing more than the simple truth when I say the crowd won the fight for him that night. Or, to be more precise, the crowd is why I lost. Ruc was fast and smart. Lots of people know how to hit; some fighters even know how to move. Only a very few, however, have the experience and presence of mind to see the pattern beneath all the skin and speed, to work inside that pattern, to twist it to their own purposes. Ruc was one of the latter.
It was almost immediately obvious that in a stand-up fight he was better than me. On the other hand, aside from taking my knives, Nayat had said nothing about forbidden moves, and I knew a lot more moves than Ruc. He was good, but he was used to bruisers like the one he’d brought down earlier in the night, big men who would come at him with blows to the face and body. I discarded that approach before the fight even started. Instead, I spent most of my time ducking and rolling, attacking him with stiffened fingers rather than fists, striking for the more obscure targets that were actually within my reach: the nerve at the elbow, the tendon at the side of the leading knee. He was quick and adaptable, but his instincts were all wrong, and instincts take years to change.
What I hadn’t counted on was the noise of the crowd. It’s not uncommon, back in Rassambur, to spar in front of the other priestesses and priests. I’d fought hundreds of times in front of a large group, but not all groups are the same. Ananshael’s faithful tend to watch fights, even fights to the death, with a combination of bright interest and cool, intellectual detachment. In fact, most of my sisters and brothers approach a fight the same way they approach a piece of music: as something to be studied, critiqued, and, in the case of the true masters, revered. That night in Rishinira’s Rage there wasn’t much study, critique, or reverence. In their place, I found an almost incandescent wall of noise.
In the first few moments, I was too involved deciphering the language of Ruc’s movements to even hear the roar. As we settled into our stances, however, into our dance of probing and retreat, that roar started to weigh on me. Sometimes I could make out individual voices hurling insults. One particular idiot, whom I would have found and killed later if I’d known what he looked like, kept screaming at Ruc to “Punch the cunt in the cunt.” I needed all my mind on the fight, on my opponent and my own body. Instead, I found my focus wobbling like a candle flame caught in a midwinter draft.
It was a good lesson. Later, after returning to Rassambur, and in future journeys out in the world, I trained to fight in just such chaos. I even spent one particularly chilly winter brawling in the Stone Pens of Erensa, and eventually I learned the skill, mastered the practice of closing off the portion of my mind that heard the noise, or that cared about it. It was not, however, a lesson that I could learn in a single night. As the fight drew on, I found myself caught in the grip of that vast fist of sound, compressed by it, until it felt as though I was battling two foes: Ruc, with his vicious punches, and the whole of Rishinira’s Rage.
It was almost inevitable, in retrospect, that he’d notice my lapses, those tiny lags between movement and response, inevitable that he would twist them to his advantage. The surprising thing was that it took so long. It wasn’t until partway through the seventh round that I misread his feint, ducked to the side, found his fist there, and felt my cheekbone break. He could have stopped there—I was already falling—but falling is not finished, and he knew enough about his business to end the job properly.
*
I woke to the smell of peaches, an old Ghannan melody drifting in the warm air, and a burning spike straight through my side. I forced my eyes open, but the world’s dim blur refused to resolve. I could make out the shifting glow of a lantern, a rectangular break in the darkness that might have been a window, and a shadow crossing through the greater gloom a few paces away. The singing came from the shadow. I almost recognized the voice, turned toward the figure, and then the pain in my side flared, blotting out all other thought.
When I came to again, the singing was gone, and the figure bent over me. This time I could make out his face, which bled from a cut just above the eye. His nose was a bruised mess, broken recently, then carelessly reset. And those eyes—sea green in the lamplight. I remembered the eyes, but couldn’t drag a name into my memory, or any recollection of where I was.
“Drink this,” the man said.
“Who…” I croaked, the word rusty on my tongue.
“Drink this,” he said again.
I took the chipped cup. It was cool against my lips. When I’d managed three or four painful swallows, I tried again.
“Where am I?”
He smiled. It was a strangely gentle smile in that battered face. “Well, you’re not dead, despite invoking Ananshael forty or fifty times.”
Fear blazed beneath my skin. If I had revealed who I was, if I’d said anything about Rassambur, or my brothers and sisters, I’d have to kill the young man with those green eyes. I shifted on the low cot, tested a fist. The knuckles burned as I tightened them, and the bones in my hand ached, but there were other ways than punching to give a man to the god. The crockery cup was heavy enough.…
“I know how it feels to want another go at a thing,” he said, closing his hand around my wrist. “But maybe we could keep the fighting in the ring.”
And like a slap across the face, it all came back to me: Antreem’s Mass, Ruc Lan Lac, the pit, my idiotic decision to go down into that pit, the crowd’s screams, thinking I was winning, realizing I was losing, Ruc’s fist like a hammer burying itself in my side over and over.…
I studied his face in the lamplight. Some of the cuts were old, but one of his eyes still leaked blood, and there was that bruised, broken nose.
“So I hit you the one time, at least.”
Ruc raised an eyebrow. “You hit me a lot more than once.” He let go of my wrist to probe at his elbow, then his shoulder, wincing as he found the bruises. “I thought you had a knife up your sleeve after all.”
I shook my head, immediately regretted it, closed my eyes, and lay back. “Pain points,” I muttered.
“No shit,” he snorted. “I had no idea being poked in the elbow could hurt so bad.”
“I would have hit your head more, but you were taking care of it. Hardly sporting.”
“You’re one to talk. I had to hit you in the ribs a few hundred times before you finally dropped your guard.”
I found myself smiling at something in his tone. “Glad I didn’t make it too easy.”
“I’ve led year-long campaigns that were easier.”
I tested the flesh over my ribs gingerly.
“I think you broke one or two.”
He nodded, flashed a smile that bordered on the apologetic. “I wanted to be thorough.”
“That wasn’t very nice,” I managed to murmur between my teeth.
He studied me with those green eyes, then leaned in slowly to kiss me on the forehead. I winced as my body shifted toward him, as though of its own accord. With one weak hand, I wiped away the blood at his hairline. When he finally straightened, he shook his head regretfully. “If you wanted someone nice, you shouldn’t have been looking for men at the Rage.”