Kai arrived from the direction of the wall.

  He was walking in the way that people walked when walking was a position they had negotiated with their body rather than a given, his left arm held against his side at the angle that arms occupied when the joint had received more than the joint had been designed to receive. His grey coat had acquired a comprehensive record of the evening, the tears and the dust and the new darkness along the left shoulder where Impact had delivered its message.

  Reaper was gone. The scythe dissolved, the dark lean form settled back into the skin. Without the Eido present he looked seventeen, which he was, and slightly smaller than he'd looked going in, which was the effect of a fight that had spent the reserves it had been spending.

  He looked at the group.

  He looked at Colette specifically.

  "Before you say anything," he said.

  "You walked away before the strategy was discussed," Colette said.

  "I had a strategy."

  "You had an observation," Colette said. "There is a difference between those two things and I described the difference to you before you walked away and you walked away anyway."

  "It worked," Kai said.

  "You have a broken arm," Colette said.

  "Crux has a broken record," Kai said. "Six months undefeated. Not anymore."

  "Kai."

  "Princess."

  They looked at each other with the specific quality of two people who had been arguing since the church and had found, somewhere in the pit of an underground arena, that the argument had acquired a different texture than it had started with. Not resolved. Not abandoned. Different.

  "The arm needs Father," Colette said, dropping the register.

  "The arm needs Father," Kai agreed, dropping it with her. He rolled the shoulder slightly and his expression did what it did when he was converting pain into vocabulary and had chosen silence instead. "Good fight though."

  "It was a good fight," Colette said.

  A pause between them that had a different quality than their pauses usually had.

  "Your Eido," Kai said. "When it hit." He looked at his right hand, at the place where the blue light had run along Reaper's form. *"I felt the difference immediately. My speed, my output, the arm—" he paused. "How long can you maintain it."

  "Longer next time," Colette said. "I held back tonight. I didn't know how you and Aris would respond to the amplification without preparation. Too much too fast can disrupt movement pattern rather than enhance it."

  Kai looked at her for a moment.

  "Next time," he said. "Full output. I'll adapt."

  "You'll listen to the strategy first," Colette said.

  "I'll consider the strategy," Kai said.

  "Peasant—"

  "It's a genuine offer," he said. "I don't do better than genuine."

  "Are you alright," Aris said, to Elysse.

  He was asking with the clinical register, the one he used for patient assessments, which was the register that required the least of his face and was therefore the appropriate register for the current circumstances.

  "Yes," Elysse said.

  "The ribs."

  "Hurts," she said. "I was aware of them the whole time."

  "That's not the same as fine."

  "I know what fine is," she said. "This is adjacent to fine. Close enough that the difference is manageable."

  He looked at her with the expression he used when patients gave him answers that were technically true and clinically inadequate.

  "Edric," he said. "As soon as we're back."

  "Yes," she said.

  Above them, Corven Ash found his register.

  "Ladies and gentlemen of the Underbowl," he said, and the room that had been producing its own noise found the habit of listening to him and returned to it. "I've been doing this for four years. In four years I have called sixteen bouts involving our champion and in sixteen bouts I have called the same result." He looked at the pit floor, at Crux still on his back on the cracked stone, at the four figures standing in the lamp light. "Tonight we have a different result."

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  The crowd answered this.

  "Our challenger party," Ash continued, with the warmth of someone giving something the description it deserved, "which arrived in this pit at a combined level that I will not embarrass them by stating publicly—"

  "Please don't," Aris said, to no one.

  "—has defeated the undefeated. Six months. Sixteen bouts. Not one of those bouts looked like this one." He paused. "I want to particularly acknowledge the young woman who ended it." His eyes found Elysse in the pit, the white hair, the borrowed armor, the composed grey eyes looking back at him. "Elysse De Carvaine, this pit will remember what you did in it tonight."

  The crowd's response to this suggested they agreed.

  Lord Drent came down from the third tier.

  He descended the pit stairs with the same unhurried elegance he'd brought to every other motion of the evening, the black coat of arms, the long grey hair, the spell tracker in his right hand. He crossed the pit floor toward the group with the expression of a man who had received precisely what he'd come for and was satisfied with the transaction.

  He stopped in front of them.

  He looked at each of them in turn, the measured assessment moving across Kai's broken arm and Aris's bruising and Colette's composed expression and settling on Elysse with the specific attention of someone who had suspected something and had been confirmed.

  "That," he said to Elysse, "was a De Carvaine strike. Your mother's form, if I'm not mistaken. The angle of the arc." He inclined his head with the courtesy of someone who respected craft regardless of its context. "Beautifully done."

  Elysse said nothing. The compliment landed in the grey eyes and was processed with the composure of someone who had decided not to give things more surface than they required.

  Drent looked at the group.

  "A creditable performance from all of you," he said. "The young man with the scythe in particular. And the coordination in the second phase was more sophisticated than I expected." His eyes moved to Colette, and something in them changed quality, the courtesy maintained and something underneath it that was not quite the same. "Your Eido hasn't changed, Colette. Still requiring others to be worth anything."

  Colette's expression held.

  "The tracker," she said.

  Drent looked at the spell tracker in his hand. Turned it once. Then extended it toward Colette with the gesture of someone completing a contract.

  "A deal is a deal," he said.

  Colette took it.

  "I do hope it helps," Drent said, and the warmth in it was real and the other thing underneath the warmth was also real, the combination that was specifically his. He looked at Elysse, at the borrowed armor and the white hair and the grey eyes. "You should be careful, Colette." His voice had dropped to a register that didn't carry to the crowd above. "She appears to be the only guild member you have left." A pause exactly long enough. "Try not to lose this one as well."

  The pit was quiet for the specific second that the words required to complete their work.

  Colette said nothing.

  Her hand around the spell tracker was closed and still and her expression was doing what it had been trained to do in rooms where things had been said that were designed to find the places that training didn't cover. It was doing it well. It was not doing it perfectly, and the imperfection was visible to anyone who knew where to look, and Drent knew where to look because he had been in enough rooms with enough people who were bleeding under composed expressions to have developed the skill.

  He inclined his head.

  "Good evening," he said, and turned and walked back toward the stairs with the unhurried elegance of someone who had nowhere to be urgently and every confidence in the quality of the exit he was making.

  Colette watched him go.

  She held the spell tracker in her closed hand and watched him go with the expression of someone standing in the aftermath of something that had found what it was looking for.

  "Colette," Aris said.

  "I'm fine," she said.

  She said it with the specific quality of fine that was not adjacent to fine but was fine in the way that Aris recognized from six years of clinic work, the fine of someone who had taken something and was managing it and would continue to manage it and did not currently require assistance managing it.

  He let it be.

  They left the pit.

  Aris went to Kai and got under the right shoulder, the working one, and Kai accepted this with the minimum of acknowledgment that was consistent with accepting it at all, which was no acknowledgment, just the adjustment of his weight and the continuation of walking.

  "Your arm," Aris said.

  "I know about my arm," Kai said.

  "Edric—"

  "I know," Kai said. "I'm aware of the arm and its current condition and the necessary treatment. I've had worse."

  "When," Aris said.

  "Before you knew me," Kai said, which closed the subject with the finality of things that happened before the relevant people were present to have opinions about them.

  Colette moved to Elysse's side.

  She did it without announcing it, the same way she'd positioned herself beside her on the walk to the Veilmarket, the presence offered rather than imposed. Elysse accepted the proximity with the same composure she'd accepted everything, the grey eyes forward, moving toward the stairs.

  "Your ribs," Colette said.

  "Are present," Elysse said.

  "That single strike—"

  "Aerial carries the weight of the arc," Elysse said. "The ribs received less than you're calculating."

  "And the approach," Colette said. "Across the full pit floor."

  "Necessary."

  "And the landing after the strike."

  "Controlled."

  "Elysse," Colette said.

  "Colette," Elysse said, with the tone of someone returning a name as a complete response to everything attached to it.

  Colette looked at her.

  The scolding that had been available was still available and she had several valid points remaining in it and Elysse's expression suggested she was prepared to receive them with the same composure she'd received the previous ones.

  "If you do something like that again," Colette said, "without telling me first—"

  "I'll tell you first," Elysse said.

  "You won't have time to tell me first, which is why—"

  "Then I'll do it anyway," Elysse said, "and tell you after."

  A silence.

  "That's not better," Colette said.

  "It's honest," Elysse said.

  They walked toward the stairs together, Colette at Elysse's side with the presence she'd decided on and Elysse moving at the careful pace of someone whose body was reminding her of the evening's decisions, and the scolding that had been available was still available but Colette had placed it somewhere she could return to later when the situation was less active.

  She held the spell tracker in her hand.

  She held it and did not look at it and thought about what Drent had said and about the fifty-three names and about Elysse's borrowed armor and the light that had come down from the stairs and ended a six month record in a single arc.

  Try not to lose this one as well.

  She held the tracker and kept walking.

  Above them the Underbowl was still making its noise, the crowd processing what it had witnessed, Ash's voice threading through it with the skill of someone weaving sound into memory. The stairs went up and the bar was above the stairs and the Undercourse was above the bar and the Greyward was above the Undercourse and somewhere above all of that Saint Edren's sat on Cours Edren with the door open and the latch broken and the morning already moving toward afternoon.

  They went up.