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Chapter 116: Outnumbered
Lyanna had meant it to be small. By the time the lanterns were lit along the pond lawn that evening, an hour after the final, about thirty people had come, and more were drifting over from the commons to see what the noise was. Aethros stood at the edge of the grass with a bowl of dumplings he had not touched and watched it grow. He did not like crowds around Roran. Every extra face was one more pair of eyes on a cheek that looked perfectly ordinary and was not.Roran sat on a low stone bench at the center of it all with his ribs strapped under a clean shirt and the green and gold sash across his knees. Someone had put a cup of hot rice wine in his good hand. He was telling the story of the final for the fourth time, and each time the gust that threw him across the platform got a little faster. His friends from the general cohort sat around him on the grass, laughing and interrupting. Nyx walked along the back of the bench, pecking politely at the sweet buns people held out to her, an
Chapter 115: The Sixteenth Place
Roran did not push himself up. His arms would not have done it. He rolled onto his stomach, dragged his right hand across the stone until it closed on Drakeheart's grip, and set the pommel against the platform like a stick. Then he hauled on it with everything he had left, and got one knee under him, and the other.The referee's mouth had already opened on the next number. It stayed open. Roran was on his feet, swaying, the sword point scraping a groove in the stone, and the arena made a noise he felt in the soles of his boots."On your feet," the referee said, and Roran nearly laughed. The man glanced to the council's bench, only for a moment, and Roran saw Halvard's hands refold themselves slowly in his lap. "Resume."Joren Falk looked surprised for the first time. It was a small thing, a tightening at the corner of his eye, but it was there. He lifted his sword and sent a crescent across the platform, and Roran did not try to meet it. He dropped to a crouch so low that his good kne
Chapter 114: Ten Count
The afternoon bell rang over the arena, and Roran walked out onto platform one as if he had not spent the night on a stone bench. The stands rose around him on every side, packed to the rim, and the noise hit him like a wall of hot air. He had imagined this walk for three days. In every version he had imagined, he could breathe all the way in.His ribs were strapped so tight that the cloth bit his skin. Under it the old break throbbed with every step, and the new bruises from Tamar's chain had stiffened overnight into a dull ache along his forearm and shins. His left hand was the worst. Two fingers had swollen where the iron had sat, and when he closed them around Drakeheart's grip a bright needle ran up to his wrist. He had not told Aethros. He had barely told himself.Joren Falk was already waiting at the far side. He was a lean young man, a little taller than Roran, in a pale green tunic with the sleeves rolled. His sword hung loose in his right hand, and his face showed nothing at
Chapter 113: Closed Doors
The council house roof was cold, and the tiles had a skin of dew that soaked through Zara's sleeves. She lay flat behind the chimney on the east wing, forty paces across the lane from the front steps. Lyanna thought she was asleep in her room. After the guards had turned them away from the headmaster's door that evening, the two of them had walked back to the dormitory without a word, and Zara had lain on her bed with her eyes open until the house went quiet. Then she had climbed out of the window.When the bell rang twelve, a lantern came up the lane. Three men walked in its light. She knew the thin clerk by his gray sash and the way he carried himself, as though the street belonged to his ledger. The big man behind him was Garo, and his right arm was bound from wrist to elbow. Halvard came last, bareheaded, in plain gray, walking at the pace of a man on his way to a dull meeting. The guards at the door straightened as he passed. Then the doors closed, and Zara was alone with the sou
Chapter 112: Thread
The window over Aethros's table had only begun to gray when the knock came. He had not slept. Since the corridor and Lyanna's white face, he had sat at the table with the rag-wrapped bead in front of him and Nyx curled against his knee, and he had gone down the same four roads until each one wore a groove in his head.He could give them Fenn. He could carry the bead to a headmaster who trusted Halvard's paper. He could break into the discipline cellar with a cut shoulder and no sleep. The fourth road was the one he had finally settled on around the fifth hour of the night, and he liked it least. At first bell he would go to Wen Shaoling, put everything on the old man's desk, and accept whatever that cost them both. He had been rehearsing the first sentence when somebody struck the door three times with the heel of a fist.Nyx's head came up. Aethros was standing before he had decided to stand, Heaven's Lament in his left hand, the other hand already on the latch."Who is it?""It's me
Chapter 111: Lamplight
Roran could not tell how long he had been sitting in the dark. He had counted his breaths until the numbers stopped meaning anything, then the throbs in his ribs, which were slower and more honest. Somewhere above him a bell rang through the stone, and he counted that too. Twelve strokes. It was midnight, and the cell still smelled of damp rope and old bucket, the same as when the guards shoved him in at the evening bell.He heard the bar lift before he saw anything. A key turned, the door scraped inward, and lamplight poured over the floor so suddenly that he threw an arm across his eyes. When he lowered it, two men stood in the doorway. The thin clerk held the lantern and wore his usual smile. Garo filled the passage behind him, the scarred man's right sleeve gone and his forearm bound in a thick bandage from wrist to elbow. Nobody else came in behind them."Student Steelheart," the clerk said. "Awake. How considerate. We would have hated to wake a sleeping champion.""I wasn't slee
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