“Ilena doesn’t like me fighting either.” He’d felt her fear and desperation in the preparation room after the fight. Whether she admitted it or not, what he’d done to Jann had scared her, and that made it so much worse.
Ash nodded. “My family has been gladiators for generations. It’s in our blood, according to Ignitus.” Her jaw clenched over his name, but softened with a small smile. “My mother pushed me to do other things.”
“Fire dancing?” Madoc asked.
A flush blossomed on her cheeks. “Yes. I loved it, but I was still born to fight and had to train for the arena. It was just a matter of time before the dance was real.”
Her pain shifted to a softer kind of grief, and he felt his own regretmingle with it. Dancing made her happy. He would have liked to see her that way.
“If what I saw at the ball is any indication, you must be pretty good.”
“Well, I don’t usually dance likethatat ceremonies.” She snorted. “Fire dancing isn’t quite so forward.”
Madoc shrugged. “I didn’t mind.”
She smiled.
He did too.
“What’s it like then?” he asked. “Fire dancing, I mean.”
A light filled her eyes. “It’s heat and hunger and life. It’s a celebration of everything good about igneia.”
Longing pulled at him. Elias had once told him geoeia was a necessary part of himself, like his lungs or his heart. Madoc had never imagined energeia feeling so crucial, but hearing the passion in Ash’s voice gave him a strange hope that anathreia wasn’t all force and power. That it might have an upside.
“It must take a lot of practice,” he said, realizing how much control she employed to use igneia. In the arena with Jann, Madoc hadn’t even felt like himself.
“It does.” She hiccuped a laugh. “Once I was in the galley of a ship on the way to Lakhu—we were always traveling for the next war. I was practicing a twist with igneia.” She leaned to the side, turning her wrist to emulate the path of the fire. “I went a little too far. I nearly set the ship on fire.”
Madoc winced. “I don’t imagine that went over well.”
“Everyone was meeting with Ignitus,” she said. “Taro found me covered in soot and corn flour—I’d grabbed the first thing in reach to put out the flames, but that just made it worse. She doused the fire before anyone knew what had happened. She called me Corn Cake for a year after that.”
He wasn’t going to laugh.
It happened anyway.
“I’m sorry,” he said, getting himself under control. “You don’t exactly look like a corn cake.”
Ash was trying to hold her lips in a straight line, but they twitched with the effort. “Madocisn’t much better. Unless you’re an angry bird. Madoc. Madoc.”
He gaped at her. “That hurts, Corn Cake.”
She covered her mouth with both hands, stifling her laughter. Her joy lifted his shoulders. It smoothed the rough edges inside him. He wished she would put her hands down so he could hear the full force of it.
“Not as much as watching you flail around the arena,” she said, humor in her eyes. “You were serious about not training.”
He snorted and she laughed again. “I’ll have you know I won four matches before this war.”
“Using anathreia?”
“Using deception. And Elias. The anathreia... we didn’t know much about it.” It was strange confessing this to her—to anyone. But she knew more about him than most people.
She seemed impressed. Was it wrong for him to hope she was?
She bit her bottom lip. His gaze focused there, on the dip made by her teeth in the soft, pink skin. “So that’s how champions are made in Deimos.”
His grin faded. His head dipped lower, and he pulled at his hood to keep his face hidden. Here he was with a gladiator who was trying to save her country from her warmongering god, while he was risking the fate of Deimos for one person—Cassia.
