“AND WHAT DO you do if Brand takes all the igneia from the fire-pit before you can get any?”
Ash finished buckling her armor’s shoulder strap and fought a groan, keeping her eyes on the preparation chamber’s dusty floor. Above her, hundreds of feet thundered in the stadium; hundreds of voices cheered. A handful of Deiman gladiators were out stoking the crowd with a fight as an announcer listed the day’s matches. His muffled words didn’t make it through to the arena’s tunnels, but Ash knew what he was saying.
Ash Nikau will fight Brand Pala to advance as Ignitus’s champion.
Madoc Aurelius will fight Jann Moisides to advance as Geoxus’s champion.
Tor had fought Raya yesterday, two days after the ball, and won. Geoxus’s other champions had fought as well, elevating the gladiator Raclin to one of Deimos’s two remaining positions in the war.
Did Madoc know Raclin personally, like Ash knew Tor? Was he inanother of this arena’s preparation chambers, adjusting and readjusting his armor, worrying not about how he had to win his fight today, but how winning would mean facing off against someone he knew? And worse, that he would have to do all this without energeia. At least Ash didn’t have that worry.
She flinched, realizing Taro was still watching her, waiting for an answer.
“Keep the fight close,” Ash said. She rose from one of the benches that filled the windowless room. The only light came from those stones Geoxus loved so much, their glow sickly green-white. “Use knives. Go for his side. Taro, Iknow. Tor’s been relentless these past two days.”
This preparation chamber was smaller. A pump at the back brought in fresh water while a cracked mirror sat over a table of bandages, rags, and medical tools. Taro stood next to that table, glaring at Ash.
“He’s been relentless,” Taro said, “so you don’t get yourself killed.”
Ash wilted and looked away. After the debacle in the stable yard, Tor, Taro, and Spark had instantly set upon Ash in the palace. She had finally confessed how Madoc had affected her grief in the arena’s tunnel, that she thought maybe he’d used air divinity to fill her lungs, soothe her tension—but that whatever he’d used, it hadn’t been geoeia. She told them how she’d blackmailed Madoc into getting her to his sponsor’s records, which was where they had been going when—
The memory of Stavos’s corpse still hovered at the edge of Ash’s mind. He had been shot in the back. He had been shot runningaway.
Days ago, Ash would have reveled in that. But now, reality overshadowed any satisfaction.
The official investigation into Stavos’s murder had turned up empty so far, and most people seemed to have shrugged off the incident as a cost of war. But Stavos’s words echoed in Ash’s mind, his dead eyes watching her, his chapped lips moving.She took it from me.
He had said that Ignitus hadn’t done this to him. Could Ignitus have paid someone else to do it, though? He would have been smart to stay out of it himself, and get rid of the gladiator through someone else. Someone like the mysteryshe.
Who could it be? Was it someone Ash didn’t know, an assassin Ignitus had hired to dispose of Stavos? Or was it someone larger—maybe Aera, the goddess of air from Lakhu, who was one of the warmongering gods who Hydra had mentioned in her message to Ignitus?
But what had this mystery woman taken from Stavos?
At least Ash knew that Madoc wasn’t involved. He’d been so sincere about everything, not just Stavos—the only thing linking him to any of this was her own assumption. Whatever Madoc was, he wasn’t involved with a gladiator who Ignitus feared or with the other gods poised against Kula. He was just trying to free his sister.
Ash’s chest warmed. It was such an honorable goal to have. There was far too little honor in these wars.
Taro slammed a fist onto the tabletop. Ash jumped.
“You’re distracted,” Taro snapped. “Get your head straight. Tor hasn’t been able to talk to you about it, he’s been so distraught, but he’s been hard on you because you left the terrace to go out, alone, with an enemy gladiator. And then another champion turns up dead?Do you know how easily that could have been you? Do you have any idea what that gladiator could have done to you, and none of us would have been there to help?”
Ash’s mouth dropped open. Taro had never snapped at her before. She was usually the one who winked at Ash when Tor or Char reprimanded her.
But she knew Tor had been furious with her. He hadn’t let her out of his sight for the past two days. Mornings of drills in the training room, afternoons running laps through Geoxus’s gardens.
“When you fight Brand,” Tor had told her, “you must be ready. You won’t get lucky again.”
Brand was the only other champion to outrank Ash in blood. He was young, and virile, and brutishly confident, with a reputation for only being satisfied with a win if it ended in death.
You won’t get lucky again.
Tor hadn’t meant her fight with Rook and how she had won because he got himself killed; Tor would never speak ill of Rook like that. He had been talking about Madoc.
“Madoc wouldn’t hurt me,” Ash fumbled now. The statement burst out of her, so obvious that she didn’t hear its stupidity until Taro’s eyebrows went up.
“Ash.” Taro’s voice was heavy with exasperation. “Every move that fighter makes in this war, he does at the behest of his god. We don’t even know what god thatis, do we? Maybe Aera. Maybe someone different entirely. We don’t know what kind of energeia he used on you. And we have no idea who killed Stavos. That’s exactly the point—wedon’t know. We’re in this together, the lot of us, and you’re young, but I’d have thought you’d learned not do something so stupid as to get tangled up with anenemy.”
Ash shot closer to Taro. “I amnottangled up with him.”
