The Triumphant (The Valiant #3)(26)
“You know,” Antony was saying as we made our choices, “the story of how you two fought together on the day you were sold in the Forum is nearly the stuff of legend now.”
“Is it?”
He nodded. “Where d’you think I came up with this idea?”
In truth, I just assumed he’d heard of the kinds of munera that occurred at other parties. I suppose I suspected him of having attended some of them.
“Two beautiful maidens,” Antony waxed poetic, raising his voice enough so that the crowd who’d begun to gather around us could hear, “chained together by iron and fate . . .”
More like chained together by iron and a mutual desire to not be killed by a pair of angry Alesian brigands bent on revenge. I turned away from Antony and rolled my eyes at Elka. She grinned back at me and tested the edge of her spear blade with her thumb. Not so sharp that you could shave with it, but sharp enough that I didn’t want it anywhere near me.
“Well,” I said, “we don’t have any leg irons, and I’ve run a bit short on fate this evening, but . . .” I looked around and noticed the long, pretty scarf embroidered with gold and silver thread draped around Lady Octavia’s neck. “If I may?” I asked, gesturing to it.
She blinked at me and then smiled, greatly amused by the whole proceedings and happy to participate.
“I promise to return it unscathed,” I said. Then I turned to Antony. “Would you be so kind, Lord Antony, as to bind my left ankle to Elka’s right?”
“My absolute pleasure,” he murmured.
I ignored the lascivious grin as he plucked the scarf from my fingertips and knelt between us. Elka, for her part, bestowed a glare upon him that warned he’d best keep his hands where she could see them while he tied the knots.
The idea was that, bound together this way, we couldn’t retreat too far from each other. Making it more of a challenge for us while, at the same time, providing a bit of a safety margin for the guests watching in a circle around us. Because, regardless of Antony’s opinions of them, I had no real burning desire to hack the flesh of a drunken partygoer, accidentally or not.
I gestured to the musicians to play. Back at the ludus, we sometimes trained with Kronos or one of the other masters beating out a tempo on a post. It was almost like dancing, and Elka and I, bored one afternoon and wanting to try something new, had worked out a routine of my blades against her spear. It started with a drill that alternated horizontal and vertical strikes from me—my blows coming from above and below, then switching to side to side—and Elka blocking them with her staff. The sequence complete, we’d switch it up and she would come at me, staff whirling, and I would defend with my swords. It was a fun exercise and one that kept us both on our toes.
But it wasn’t something we’d ever done with a crowd watching, and maybe that’s what made the difference that night. Because once we’d begun to warm up to the ebb and flow of the sequences, I noticed the look in Elka’s eyes shifting, starting to resemble the expression she only ever got when she was in the arena. Not the practice ring.
And I’m not so certain I didn’t have the exact same look. The one that meant you were so focused on the fight, the rest of the world disappeared. There was only winning. Because beyond that . . . there was only losing. And neither of us was going to lose.
Elka spun deftly on her tethered right leg, hopping over the taut rope of the scarf with her left leg as she did so and winding up for a vicious horizontal slash with her spear held at its greatest extension, which well surpassed how far I could go to evade it. And since I couldn’t fly—no Cretan springboards that night—I dropped flat onto my back and rolled instead. But the marble floor was cold and unforgiving and I jammed my elbow hard, sending a flare of shooting pain down into my hand.
I lost my grip on one of my blades and scrambled to retrieve it with numb, prickling fingers. Elka saw my distress and took advantage of it, slapping the flat of the spear blade down between me and my blade and only missing my hand by a hairsbreadth. I felt a surge of red heat crash like a wave behind my eyes and kicked out with my free leg. Elka went down heavily as her knee went sideways from the blow, and suddenly we were both on our hands and knees.
I lunged for my dropped sword and bounced back up onto my feet, yanking hard on the scarf tether and pulling her off balance. With a snarl, she righted herself and slashed through the air, underhand. Her spear’s blade sliced clean through the delicate length of silk that bound us together. The sudden lack of tension sent me staggering backward. Elka lunged, nearly impaling me as I twisted frantically away, and—suddenly blind-angry—I lashed out in retaliation with a double cross-body strike that I didn’t even think to pull. We were both fighting beyond the limits of control and practice sequences in that moment. The tempo of the drums had increased until it was like a thunderstorm in my ears.
And we were fighting in the arena.
With a cry torn from deep in my chest I spun, my blades flashing up in a whirling overhead arc, and brought them crashing down . . . onto the very center of Elka’s spear. Held at a perfect angle to block and hold me there. We strained against each other, matched, balanced, in a perfect lockup. If either of us shifted even minutely to break it, that fighter would lose.
And neither one of us was going to lose.
“Yield,” I ground out between clenched teeth.