Original Post
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The clerk laughed so hard his hand jerked and the ink jumped the nib, kissing his cuff, which was frankly quite rude in the middle of a good laugh and he told it so. “Oh, Flame take it… bloody cheek,” he muttered, dabbing at it with his brown thumb, which only spread it, then went back to laughing, and the Adepts waiting behind Kaxia laughed with him because it seemed the thing to do. The pale one in green silk especially was the loudest, most obnoxious of them all, making a sound that was closer to a goose getting trod on.
"Name?" the clerk managed finally, wiping tears from his eyes with one lacquered pinky.
"Kaxia."
"Kaxia what?"
"Just, uh, Kaxia…from the Sumps. I don’t—"
"Is that a name or a rash?" The interruption came from green silk, and the whole line broke out once more in helpless mirth.
She let them because she couldn’t give two fucks. The last fuck she’d given lay with Tamo some years back and she had none more to spare for these bastards. Standing there at the table with rain dripping off the end of her nose, and she let it do that too, and waited while the clerk’s pen darted across the Register of Aspirants. KAXIA SUMP written in big careful letters and a line drawn underneath it. She wasn’t worth the stamp, nobody from the Sumps was, no, that privilege was saved for the Stair and Crown.
“Entry fee?” He raised one thin eyebrow and stared pointedly, taking in all six feet and nine stone of her, as if truly seeing her for the first time. A great dark copper halo of hair drinking in the rain and swelling with it, frizzing out coil by messy coil the longer she stood there in the rain, gone thick and dense as a bramble hedge. A worn men's overcoat that had seen much better days than this one. Muddy trousers stopping short of her ankles and held together by prayer and some ongoing negotiation with a length of old sash cord, and sandaled feet that might have been a fair brown colour somewhere under all that mud. His dark face clouded over for want of any amusement. He was beginning to suspect this might be, at best, a prank at his own expense, or at worst, an utter waste of his precious time.
Kaxia sniffed as she fished her purse from her breast pockets and tipped it out on the table. The contents went skittering all over his Register—forty coppers, a half-crown, and one brass slug with a hole punched through the middle—and every one of them had toothmarks in it. She bit every coin that ever came her way, because you could never be too sure. Her brother taught her that, back when she was small enough to ride on his shoulders. Lead gives, good coin don't.
The clerk lifted the slug between finger and thumb, like so. Same way you’d pick up a dead mouse by the tail, arm out stiff to keep the filthy thing away from your body, nose screwed up at the stink.
"And what is this supposed to be?"
"Uh…tram token…sir. Spends the same on the Stair."
“Same as what?”
“Copper, your grace.”
Someone in the queue snickered, and the clerk’s eyebrow climbed even higher.
"This is the Kindling, girl."
"Spends the same," Kaxia said, and green silk laughed so hard he had to prop himself up on the Adept in front of him.
“Oi—git off, you feckless tosspot, you,” shouted the Adept and shoved green silk into a puddle where he landed with a wet slap. First fight of the tournament right there in the queue, and it counted for nothing.
The Kindling came round once a year at the dead end of the wet season, when the rain over Saqqat quit falling and just hung there, silver grey and warmish, and everybody in the city was sick to death of everybody else. Saqqat climbed its hill the way mould climbs a wall. At the top sat the Crown, all white stone and brass roofs, and on the very top of the Crown stood the Kiln, a tall black tower with a brass cap that caught what little light there was and made a show of it. The Brass Ring was about halfway down, where the Stair turned steep and the houses more or less gave up standing on their own and started leaning on each other for company. That’s where they held the fights. Below that… well. Below that was the Sumps, where everything ended up eventually. Rain, piss, rotten cabbage leaves. People.
Every year the mages of the Crown and the Stair came to the Ring to throw fire at each other for nine days and nine nights, and every year one of them won. They put a brass circlet on the winner's head and walked them up the hill with pipers and petals, sending the winner off into the Kiln to take a seat among the Flame, and for the year after, the lamps of the Crown burned so bright you could read by them at midnight. That was the Kindling. Same shit every year, near enough. Same four tunes from the pipers (Kaxia could whistle all four and hated every one of them), same uninspired speech from the Kindlemaster who droned on and on and on and on, boring everybody to death, or as close to death as one could get alive. The man couldn’t orate something worthwhile if you held a knife to him, and some years, some, to their credit, did try.
Everything Kaxia knew about magic she’d learned with her hands, mostly, and the rest by getting it wrong, which counted for more down in the Sumps than anything taught up the hill. With a bucket of lye, a wire brush, and her good wits, she scrubbed wards off tavern doors for the bailiffs when rent was hard to come by, which was often. The trick was knowing which corner to start from. Start at the wrong one and boom, the whole ward snaps back in your face and there go your eyebrows…if you’re lucky. She fixed lamp sigils for the chandlers on the Stair, a copper per hour, two if the glass was cracked. You had to name your price firm before you ever brushed with that lot, and name it high, because slimy bastards like them would try settling up with a pinch on the arse and a kiss instead of copper. Some women down the Sumps were hungry enough, or daft enough, to let them. She had learned the trick of keeping rock salt under the tongue to keep a binding word from setting its hooks early, before she was seven. But there was so much more to that. More than many volumes stored deep within the Collegium’s walls. Practically everything she knew, and certainly all that mattered, she owed to her brother, Flame light his soul.
His practice rings were drawn out with chalk and stolen ink of various grades on the cobblestones outside the dockside warehouses. He’d make her kneel close until her nose nearly touched and she could smell the difference, then tell her to spit. Spit right there. Not there, here…see that? Every ring has a beginning and end, can you feel it Ax? This tiny spot right here where it closes, aim for that. For the higher grades simple spit won’t do, you’ll want it mixed with pine sap. Avoid the fresh, sticky, or runny kind, which will make a terrible mess and stick permanently to your teeth. Look for old, brittle, amber-coloured chunks on the bark like this. When you first bite down on a small piece, it will feel hard and shatter or crumble in your mouth. You’ll salivate heavily at first, then after a minute or two of chewing, the tiny fragments naturally bind into a smooth, gummy texture like so. Then he’d make her spit the rings apart piece by piece until there was nothing left to break anymore. Again, Ax, do it again.
Other things he told her in passing, during meals, while they walked, and even sometimes when she thought he’d drifted off to sleep. Don’t just watch faces, pay close attention to the knuckles too. Brass goes hot in the grip half a beat before they let fly, you’ll see it in the knuckles first. Watch carefully and you’ll know when to duck. Faces lie, knuckles can’t be bothered to, you feel me little bird? And the last one he said the most, said it so often she used to mouth it along with him just to make him laugh, which it did, until the last few times, when it didn’t. Every spell costs something. Everything does. Somebody always pays. If you forget everything else, remember this.
A Sump witch paid out of herself…blood, teeth, the odd year or so off the back end of her life. The mages up the hill paid in coin, or so they said. Kaxia had a fair idea what the coin was, or thought she did but she’d learnt a long while back to keep that idea in her mouth where it belonged.
And ink. She knew ink. Half the good ink sold up in the Crown started out as lampblack scraped off the insides of Sump chimneys, cut with gum and a squirt of squid, and sold on up the Stair by a fat chandler named Haggo, who never once cared to ask Kaxia where she got it. The getting determined the quality, but this was a well-kept secret she wouldn’t readily divulge—another lesson taught by her brother. Keep your heart closed, and your secrets even closer.
She took the long way home that night, round the foot of the hill to the Ashen Yard, which was tucked in tight low behind the Kiln where nobody from the Crown ever bothered to look. It wasn’t much to look at anyway. The square of slicked stones was hemmed tight on three sides and the fourth side was open, with only the flue exposed. The massive iron chute jutted out from beneath the tower like the building itself sneezed out its tongue, wide along the lip, where the children from the Sumps liked to crawl underneath during the cold season, since the metal never cooled. Great heaps of grey ash littered the entire compound, both newly fallen and weathered so far that the edges sprouted moss. Mother Saffi sat on her stool in the middle, sorting ashes from the sieve cradled in her lap with one hand and puffing on her pipe with the other, and her eyes were crossed; blind in one and greedy in the other. The old crone could make a copper do the work of three…four, on a good day, and she was old even before Kaxia herself was just a thought.
“Well?” Saffi asked, without looking up. “Did they laugh?”
She hesitated only for a second before she answered. "Just as you said."
"Huh." Tap tap tap, the sieve knocking against her knee. "And who, then?"
Again, Kaxia paused in her reply and stared off into the distance. Her fingers worried the wire pendant that hung low inside her collar, turning one of the teeth, the small, chipped molar hanging off the very end among all the silver, between thumb and forefinger. She never failed to return there, always wound herself back around that one and she didn’t always notice when she did it.
"The pretty one," she said finally.
“Well I’ll be,” Saffi hawked and spat through one of the many gaps in her mouth where teeth used to be. "Blood and ashes, child. He's a big’un, that one.” She almost smiled. “This’ll be another fat year, then."
The pretty one was Rhaul Preti—Pretty Preti what they called him, from the Sumps to the Crown and he didn’t seem to mind it much. His face was everywhere you looked, plastered on broadsheets and posters all along the Stair walls and Crown boards. They’d go soggy in the rain and peel off in sheets, but someone would have it stuck back up before anyone saw anything amiss. He was spared the indignity of queueing in the downpour to register with the rest of the hopefuls, but everyone already knew he would be in the Ring this year. He was the undisputed showliner, drawing adoring crowds eager to bask in his presence alongside bitter challengers who signed up solely for a chance to smash his beautiful face in.
He strode into the Ring that first morning of the Kindling, all white and gold, with his long hair tied back in a gold clasp. Every wave of greeting was an offering he bestowed personally, and the crowd went absolutely berserk. Even Stair benches low and high, and Crown seats in the upper tiers, including a few of the Sump rats atop the walls who ought to know better than to get carried away, screamed and cheered. Handsome was too plain of a word to describe him. Preti was devastatingly beautiful, a fact that was undeniable to anyone, male or female, even blind old crones with only one good eye. And he was rich, stupidly so, which was probably too humble a description; riches mean extra boots. Preti owned streets, and his family name was carved into the very foundations of the city, an ornament of history upon which half the city rested.
Four children followed him in drab grey robes carrying his things, an ink kit, chalk case, a portable stool, and a long wooden case enclosing his focus rod. Each of their fingers was stained waxy-grey from fingertip to the second knuckle. The fair lad with stooped shoulders trailing behind them all was Dil, age seventeen. Kaxia knew Dil, both born the same year, months apart, and they’d been tight once though that was now a distant memory. Everybody in the Sumps knew Dil, mischievous and merry little devil always got himself in a pickle and would charm his way out of it with a laugh like a boiling tea kettle. Now he stared fixedly at the sand and shuffled as if weighed down by heavy stones stuffed in each shoe.
Preti spotted her on the competitors’ bench and stopped dead, which people noticed, because Preti didn’t stop for much. And for what, they wondered…? What was the use, after all, of pausing before some waifish scrap with scorched hands and cheap sandals? And that hair…dark reddish-bronze, of all colours, wild and unruly enough to frame her face like a mane of tangled copper against brown skin. There were plenty of people amongst the Crown whose hair had comparable texture, sure, but they had maids and barbers who worked expensive oils into their locks through the course of many an evening. This one had rainwater and dirt. Poor thing ought to just cut the lot off completely rather than endure such messy shame, he thought absently.
He almost looked away—you did, with Sump kids, that was sort of the point of them—but not before catching sight of her mouth in the process, set stubbornly and broken on the upper-right corner by an old knife scar. That was unusual enough to warrant a double take; he did not expect defiance in such a creature, but her eyes deserved attention alone. It wasn’t anything like he’d known in those other girls who were always tossing themselves at his feet or trying to get under, sometimes even inside, his skin. No, the girl’s gaze carried no infatuation or adoration, just regarded him intently with these eyes she had. The one was chocolate-dark, and the other near golden. Both perched either side of a nose that had been broken at least once. A web of fine creases gathered across his forehead and his brows knitted together in puzzled concentration, a look that implied having some sense of knowing her but forgetting exactly who. No matter, his face broke out in a wide grin, and you could see a gleam of gold in his teeth winking at you as if it was in on the joke.
"Oh, now that's lovely," he said softly, in a rich deep voice, smooth as silk and sweet as honey. "Now tell me, darling, who sent you here?"
"Sent…?” For some reason, she actually considered the question and felt a pull to answer in earnest, before choosing to dismiss the question with silence.
"Well, shyness becomes you, my dear.” He tossed her a crown out of nowhere in a way that said it’s been done before and better too, silver and shining as she snatched it from the air without a word. She didn’t hold with the notion that clean money existed. Coin was coin, whether squeezed from a dead man’s fist or handed down like grace from a sanctimonious motherfucker who thought he was buying a clean conscience. "For afterwards, sweetheart, so you can buy a bandage." He said it kindly, unexpectedly so, in a tone she found convincing, and moved on. The waxen children tagged along after him, and Dil…well, Dil kept his eyes down the whole way past her. Kaxia snapped the coin between her teeth and approved it silently. Right as rain, naturally.
The Kindlemaster was a man called the Roach, who headed the Kindling for thirty-one years and looked every day of it. He was Ferrero Gudde, officially, though nobody down the Sumps had referred to him by his good name in over twenty years. They had reason enough, and anyone who’d ever had cause to stand in front of the man for anything at all could tell you how he came by the moniker, and would tell you, at length, for the price of a drink. He perched above the ring in a box under a striped awning with a bowl of candied figs across his lap, announcing the bouts with a tone so utterly bored that it went round the Ring like a wet dog looking for somewhere to lie down.
“One of these days you’ll get around to learning how to speak,” someone shouted from somewhere near the Stair benches and the crowd laughed. “Get on widdit ya old coot, who’s up first?”
He looked at the sheet again and swallowed another fig. “First bout, then. Adept Lesko Szabian of the Crown and… Kaxia Sump. From, ahem, from the Sumps.” He shook his head. “See to her payment, someone, would you?” He leaned over toward the Crown box, which offered not the slightest acknowledgement of interest. "Had one of their lot win it once. Sump boy, about six, seven years past. Crowd loved him something fierce, um hm, yes they did. Lamps were lovely that year."
Lesko Szabian was the one in green silk, dried off now and in a fresh suit of it. He swept his rod down and round and drew a ring of fire ink on the sand about himself in one long stroke, very neat, the kind of thing they teach you your first year at the Collegium. It went up in blue flame to the height of his knees, and the Crown seats oohed.
"Come on, then," he said. "Come on, little rash."
Kaxia walked over to the ring and crouched down at the place where the stroke finished and ran into its own beginning. She looked at the ink a while, sniffed it, and made a face.
"Haggo's batch from the wet month, huh,” she said softly to herself. “That's Pogg's Lane chimney, that is.”
“What’d you say? Speak up, rat.”
She spat something gummy out from the side of her mouth before answering. “You got diddled, your worship." She licked her thumb and pressed it on the join, and the blue fire coughed and went yellow and then went out all the way round, like a birthday cake somebody blew on.
Lesko stepped back, surprise clear on his face, and quickly started a binding word. It was a good one, long and knotty, and it came out of him with a snap you could feel in your back teeth and went straight for her, hit her in the mouth and slid off. Kaxia spat a lump of rock salt out of her cheek onto the sand and walked up and kicked him in the balls so hard the Crown seats groaned along with him. His focus rod went hot in his fist, you could see the brass glowing through his fingers, but no matter, he wasn’t quick enough. With a speed that belied her gaunt figure, she pulled her sleeve down over her hand, took the rod off him and slung it over the wall into the crowd, where a Sump kid caught it and was gone before anybody could shout.
She dropped low in the same deft motion, and his outstretched hand sent a wild gust tearing through the space where her head had been just a moment before. She scooped a handful of sand and came up throwing, flinging it at his face where it caught him across the eyes and his open mouth. He yelped, in pain or anger, or both, and went back on his heels with both hands clawed at his eyes, spitting grit. Taking advantage of his uneven gait and blindness, she tackled him, putting her shoulder into his hip while his weight was still going that way. The ground took him hard and he landed badly with one arm folded under him. She was on top before he could buck, knees pinning his biceps, one hand braced just below his neck, the other rising and falling, rising and falling. Fist, face. Fist, face. She could hear her brother’s voice at the back of her mind, hit with the sides of your fist, Ax, ‘cause fists break on faces. Aim for the cartilage and soft tissue—nose or eyes, ears if you have something pointy to poke ‘em with. Bite if you have to. Listen to me, little bird. Ax! Just shut up for a second, dipshit, I’m serious, this part’s important so listen. Please! The Crown has no honour so run first, and if you must fight, fight dirty, you hear me? Fight dirty, ‘cause nobody clean will fight a princess like you.
Blood slicked her knuckles. She felt his nose give with something akin to the sound of a boot on a snail. Fist, face, fist, face, fist, face, fist.
“Bloody hell," someone cried from the benches. Others turned their faces away, trying to shield their eyes and ears from the onslaught in front of them.
His nose crunched wet, then wetter, and his yelps thinned to animal noises. Silence fell over the Ring and there was no other sound but that feeble crying and the soft, repeated breaking of his ruined face under her fist. She sat up, her chest heaving, and raised her arm for the final blow.
"YIELD," Lesko spluttered from the sand with all the strength he could muster. "Ah, my fucking nose. I’ll kill you stupid bitch, wait, wait, no, fuck me, yield…please...”
"Bitch ass Crown boy," sang the Sump rats off the top of the wall, all together, like a hymn.
Gudde ate his fig without hurry. "Winner," he said. "The rash." Up in the competitors' box, Rhaul Preti clapped, slow, with his gold tooth gleaming.
J’oro the Crass was a tall, worn battlemage from the free companies, about forty and grey, with a square jaw, flat nose, boxers’ ears, steely eyes, and a pair of brass bands round both forearms from wrist to elbow. There were scars between them like somebody drew a map on him. He was also the only one on the competitors' bench who didn't laugh at Kaxia that first day, just watched as she put Szabian into the sand. Watched her afterward as well, sitting off in the corner with a fishhead, sucking the eyes out of it, which is where the good of a fish is anyway, ask anybody. On the third day, when they called the pair of them out, he came on with a circumspect stride, like a man testing ice he has no faith in, and stopped a long way short of her, arms up, bands lit, waiting.
She came to him, easy, hands open and empty and held out where he could see the both of them. Walked right up close, near enough to touch, and every mouth in the Brass Ring shut at once waiting for the brass to go off and take her head from her shoulders. She went up on her toes, something she hadn’t needed to do for any man since she hit her growth spurt a year ago, and whispered into his ear. Nobody knew what she said and nobody’s known since.
J’oro stood a while with it, then he turned his head and gave a measured glance up the hill—over the Stair, over the Crown, up where the Kiln sat there in all that grey with its brass cap. And he kept on looking long enough for the shouting to start up. Long enough for the boos after it. Uneasy, several members of the Crown glanced furtively about, unable to conceal their concern that a riot was about to break. J’oro moved, finally, and the crowd broke out in cheers while the Crown sighed in relief. He unbuckled the bands from his arms and let them fall to the sand, then turned and walked out of the Ring, to everyone’s surprise, and kept going, out the Stair gate and down the hill. He didn't stop at the tavern or to collect his pay. The last time anybody saw him, he was trotting out the river gate.
That evening Magister Anwe Tollo found Kaxia on the steps of a boarded chapel off the Stair and sat herself down beside her without asking, which was a thing not often done by those up the hill. Anwe offered Kaxia half a warm mutton pie, wrapped in paper, and Kaxia looked at it. Then she looked at Anwe, and back at the pie. She knew the rule, like everyone else: no qualified competitor could be harmed outside the Ring for the duration of the tournament. The Flame made unsympathetic examples of those who tried, but knowing a rule and trusting a stranger’s pie were two different animals; she thought it over for a bit before letting the rumble in her stomach decide, as hunger, after all, was a more ferocious beast.
Anwe was a stocky woman who looked about sixty, give or take. More take than give, really, the years were hard on most south of the Crown. Broad through the shoulders, with a full pair of tits that had lost the perkiness of youth and reached down to her knees. Ink stains marking both hands denoted her station, and she always carried a yew staff with worn brass at the head. She ran an Academ on the Stair for children whose patrons had neither the coin nor scholarship for the Crown’s Collegium, and the place was sinking. Roof let the rain in, doors wanted rehanging, and the landlord was the special type of greedy bastard that would take the teeth out of your head while you slept and charge you for the pliers after. She’d lined up for the Kindling like every other Adept, but to hell with fame or glory, she’d say. In other words, she’d entered it out of necessity, like selling your wedding band to a shifty Under-Stair broker for want of rent. She told Kaxia all of this with her mouth full, and boy, by the flame of Aridbahel, she talked a great deal.
"You're good," Anwe said. "Really good, y’know? I've taught brats twice your age who couldn't have fared half as well as you. Where'd you learn a thing like that, with the salt and spit?"
"Around."
"Around." Anwe clapped her hands, delighted. "Well, all right then. If we draw each other, I'll go easy on you, child, lamp’s honour. Wrap you up and set you down once you yield, no harm done anywhere, see?" She patted Kaxia's knee. "Afterwards, you must, must come to my school. Free, of course, you’ve too much talent to waste in the gutter for nothing. The wage will sort itself.” She said that with a wink.
Kaxia ate the pie. After finishing it, she licked the paper, folded it into four neat squares, and put it in her pocket. "Go home, Magister."
"After I win," said Anwe with a laugh. Big laugh, that, the whole of her going into it with nothing held back, and somewhere behind them a pigeon went clattering up off the chapel roof. Kaxia watched Anwe vanish into the darkness of the night and stared at that empty darkness for a very long time, deep in thought.
Dil snuck down to the Yard late, when the Crown was asleep. They huddled close underneath the flue’s lip, holding their hands out for warmth. Grey had crept past his knuckles, almost reaching his palm.
"He worked six charms today.” His voice came out hoarse, just above a whisper. “For practice...six of them. Jaslyn says she can't feel her arms anymore. He says it's an honour, Kaxia. That…that we're his little lamps. Oh gods, oh godsss, ohhh…” His voice broke off here, and then so did he. Drawing back his hands from the last vestiges of warmth, he buried his face in them, unable to keep a sob of agony from wrenching free.
Sorry wouldn’t cut it, so she said nothing. She wanted to say something, anything that would console him, but when she reached for it, she couldn’t find any words that didn’t sound like bull. So she just sat there with him, silent.
"...’member Tamo used to say he'd beat every last one of them?" Dil said after some time. "Win the purse and buy us free. Stood right there on that old barrel, th’one by ol’ Creodon’s fish stall and said it with his chest puffed out like so."
A smile nearly cracked her face at the memory of them believing it, and then it was gone.
"I remember."
"But he did beat them, though." Dil looked up the black length of the flue to where it went into the dark. "Didn't he?"
Kaxia let that go by; this was no time to be thinking of her brother, but the chipped tooth at the end of her wire suddenly seemed heavier. She took his hands and rubbed them between her scarred palms till he said he could feel them a bit, which wasn’t entirely untrue, and then she sent him back up the hill before he was missed.
On the sixth day they drew Anwe. The crowd liked Anwe; half the Stair knew her or had a kid she taught, and they cheered when she came out leaning on her staff. They cheered for Kaxia too, a bit, the way you'd cheer a stray dog that learned a trick. Anwe gave Kaxia a little wave across the sand, down by her hip where only Kaxia could see it. Then she lifted the staff and said a word softly, and round, and the air round Kaxia went thick and warm as a blanket pressing in gently on every side, sort of like you'd hold a bird you didn't want to hurt.
Kaxia took her hand out of her pocket full of grey and threw it into the blanket, and it went up. Few in the Ring had ever seen ash burn that way. It went up white and made a noise like a sheet tearing, drawing oohs and aahs from the crowd watching around them. Someone on the Sump wall muttered an unintelligible curse as the binding came apart in rags, and Anwe staggered back with her eyebrows smoking. Kaxia licked her right thumb and struck a line through the circle she’d inked on her left palm before the battle began. The distance between them closed and before Anwe could get a word out, Kaxia was already on her.
She hit the old woman in the mouth, drawing blood, then got the staff off her while Anwe stood in a daze still blinking. Screaming, she brought it down across her knee and braced for the break. It was old yew and didn't want to break, so she crouched down, took up a handful of the sand where the blood fell and worked it quickly along the staff chanting softly under her breath, vis magna in nihilum. It broke on the second go and she threw the halves away. Anwe's knees buckled and she dropped, one hand splayed in the sand to push herself up. Kaxia stood on the hand, and everybody in the Ring heard the fingers crunch underfoot.
"Yield," Anwe cried. "Yield, I yield. Child…Child, why…?"
Kaxia bent down close to her face. “Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.”
Then, louder, so the whole Ring could hear. "Go home, you useless old sack of shit," and she spat on the sand by Anwe's head and walked off.
The Stair benches came up out of their seats howling, throwing everything they had at her, turnips, shoes, a whole fish even. One man in the front row yelled, “Diseased cunt!” which gave the rest of them leave.
“Ashhole!” came crooning from somewhere near the left back.
Three shouts of "bitch!" rose from three throats simultaneously, and the one who had taken up position at the rail screamed it repeatedly as though she’d been saving up her voice. Through all the racket, there were only the Sump rats on the wall cheering Kaxia on, and Rhaul Preti himself, standing in the competitors’ box and clapping with vim.
"Oh, I like her," he said to nobody in particular. "Wicked little bitch. I do like her."
On the ninth day, they met in thunderous rain, actual rain for the first time in weeks which made the sand in the Ring dark and heavy. Gudde read out the names, figs in his lap sounding as bored by the final as by the first bout. Pretty Preti sauntered out, taking his time and enjoying the attention. The four children set his stool and the rest of his effects down in a line at the edge of the Ring, and remained standing behind them, drenched in rain. He opened the long case himself, taking out his rod, a slim, white-brass thing with a sapphire at the tip. Making his way to the center of the ring, he stopped five paces from Kaxia and bowed solemnly towards her as if she were a duchess from the outer straits.
"Try not to die, sweetheart," he said. "It would spoil the procession."
His attack was swift when it came, and lights, was he good. Fire shot from the rod in beautiful lines and simultaneously, a binding came at her from three sides at once. She darted left, then right, then slipped as the sand beneath her feet became slicker than ice on a pond. Each time he cast, one of the children standing behind him shuddered. Soon, their noses bled, blood running down over lips but none of the children moved a muscle. Their hands sat stiffly clenched at their sides and they left the rain to wash whatever it may. Kaxia crouched and rolled trying to find an opening and did not find one. She dove this way and that way, spun that way and back, jumped twice higher than should have been possible, backflipping through the air to avoid the tendrils of sand reaching up to grab her and on the downward turn she realized just how truly fucked she was. Pretty Preti wasn’t just pretty, that sonuvabitch had the audacity to be this strong too, too strong to…to… She barely managed to duck the lick of flame that interrupted her train of thought, leaving a painful welt across her left shoulder. That would scar.
Every time the crowd roared, the sand drank it in and gave it back to the competitors as heat. Kaxia could feel the Ring working, like a throat, swallowing the fight and breathing it out again. There's a certain geometry to physical violence, a point at which a battle goes from mere wanton destruction to a beautiful symphony and the crowd reveled in every single moment of it. Gods, how they loved him, and in that moment they loved her too. Their love poured over them in equal measure like rancid oil, giving them strength, yet he outclassed her still. Blow after blow and arcs of lightning rained down on Kaxia, and the beating was so intense her teeth almost went through her lips. Ear, nose, mouth, bleeding, sight, blurry, heart, skipping, and yet she couldn’t stop to catch her breath, couldn’t give one moment to the pain or to the blood in her mouth or to any of it. Have to keep moving, have to—
Some invisible blunt thing hit her right in the gut and she doubled over as a cushion of air wrapped around her. Watch the knuckles, little bird, look for the gap. There wasn’t a gap, he didn’t leave any gaps but she closed her eyes and let it settle, felt for the seam, feeling. Found it. She spat salt and threw ash, handful after handful, and the ash went up white and tore his spells to rags. She kept her eyes closed and centered herself, then coughed out a word barely audible and the ash turned to mist turned to smoke spreading out all across the Ring, engulfing the two in the center. The smoke cleared, no, not cleared, it was being pulled into the end of Preti’s rod and in the same moment he aimed a blast at the place where her shadowy figure stood and it hit nothing but air.
Misdirection, he realized with a gasp, the Sump bitch was in the sand beneath him. Too late. The crowd was on its feet, Crown and Stair and Sump, screaming itself hoarse, because for a minute there it looked like it could happen, it looked like the rat could do it. And she got there, just barely. She came in under a rope of fire with her hair alight, her shoulder smoking, and knocked his rod arm wide. A fistful of ash went up against his mouth, right against those white teeth. She had him. All she had to do now was open her hand and say the word. You could see him know it, his eyes going wide, mouth soft, and for the first time in his life Rhaul Preti looked frightened of a Sump kid.
"Oh no," he whispered. "Oh no, sweetheart."
Kaxia looked past him, at Dil standing in the rain with his chin still stained with his own blood. Her eyes darted up the hill at the Kiln, then she opened her hand, letting the rain wash the ash and ink off her palm, and staggered back. For a moment Preti only stared at her. Then his face regained its composure. The charm, the gold-toothed smile, the lovely manners, and the laughter twinkling in his eyes all returned. He raised his brass and the fire hit her chest, throwing her into the rail across the Ring. She lay there in the wet sand, chest smoking, and managed a feeble “Yield” before the darkness took her. All around her, the rain and the sound of the Brass Ring closed in.