Chapter 35: The White Circle

The white circle was in the small training yard behind the stables, where the Class D duels were held, and nobody important ever watched them. The nobles and the merchants and the city crowds were all in the main yard or the Great Hall, or already finding their seats in the arena for the evening. Here there were only a few dozen students along the fence eating roasted nuts and talking too loudly, some instructors on a wooden bench, and a clerk with a list.

Aren walked into the circle with his hair still wet and his shirt stuck to his back. He had not had time to change or eat. Two hours ago he had been underwater in a freezing cellar, and his hands had only stopped shaking because he had pressed them hard against his sides on the walk up from the gate. His whole body felt heavy and slow, like after a long night in the Old Quarry.

Across the circle, Aldous Penrose was waiting.

Up close he was a thin young man with a weak chin, a nervous mouth, very clean hands and very new boots. Two months ago he had stood up in the third row of the Great Hall and sworn he’d seen a scholarship boy near the vault at midnight, and he had not looked at Aren once while he said it. He was looking openly now.

[Aldous Penrose. Rank E: Level 6.][Hostility: 33% → 52%.]

It had been thirty-three this morning. Somewhere between dawn and now, Aldous Penrose had apparently decided to hate him a great deal more.

"My sister says you’re cursed," Aldous said under his breath while the clerk read out the rules. "Celia. She says everyone near you gets hurt." His thin mouth twisted. "She can’t heal anymore, you know. Not since the Rift. Her hands shake too much."

Aren said nothing.

"So I’m going to make sure you never come near her again. The instructors said no killing." Aldous smiled thinly, without any humor at all. "They didn’t say anything about legs."

’He’s been practicing that line in a mirror.’

The clerk dropped his hand.

Aldous was not a good fighter, and Aren had known it for two weeks. He had watched him train behind the east tower and seen a nervous young man who swung too wide, stepped too far, and always glanced nervously at his own feet before he moved. But his class was Ironward, and when he called on it his skin turned grey and hard as old metal, and swords skidded off it. He didn’t need to be good. He only needed to keep walking forward and hitting until the other person ran out of places to go.

So that was what he did, and Aren fell.

That had always been the plan, because a Servant didn’t beat a Class B noble in front of witnesses, not even a bad one. He let Street Fighter’s Instinct show him where every blow was going and stumbled clumsily away from all of them, arms flailing, boots slipping in the white sand. It was much harder than it had been with Vivienne. His legs were cold and slow and wouldn’t move when he told them to, and twice he read a blow perfectly and still could not get clear in time. A practice sword cracked against his left arm like a stick hitting a wet rug. Another caught his hip right beside the long scar, and the old pain flared white for a moment, and he made himself roll away across the sand and come up on one knee, gasping.

The students along the fence were laughing. "Get up, Zero! Show us that combat aptitude!"

Aldous wasn’t laughing. His face had gone grey and hard and his eyes were fixed on Aren’s left knee.

He came forward again, and this time he didn’t swing at the chest or the arms like you swing in a duel. He swung low, a short chopping blow aimed straight at the side of the knee, the place where a leg bends and doesn’t bend back. Aren saw it coming and twisted desperately, and the sword hit the outside of his thigh instead, hard enough to numb the whole leg, and he went down on his side.

"Penrose wins," the clerk called. "Penrose, step back."

Aldous didn’t step back. He raised the practice sword over his head in both hands, and Aren, lying flat in the sand, looked up at it and at the grey stone face above it and understood that Aldous had heard the clerk perfectly well. A heavy wooden blade, swung down with all the strength of a Rank E body onto a leg lying flat on the ground. Nobody at the fence moved, and the instructors were only slowly getting up from their bench. It would be over before they reached the circle.

A Servant from Class D couldn’t stop this, not without showing everyone exactly what he was.

So he didn’t stop it. He looked past the sword, at the thin pale hands wrapped around its grip, and thought one word.

’Zero.’

For one second, the strength in Aldous Penrose’s hands went to nothing. Not his arms, not his shoulders, just his grip. His fingers simply let go, the way fingers let go in a dream, and the practice sword slid out of them at the very top of the swing, turned over once in the air behind his head, and landed in the sand with a dull thud two paces behind him.

In the same second, Aren’s own grip vanished too. He was lying in the sand and didn’t need his hands, so he let his fingers go limp in the white grains and waited for the second to pass.

Aldous stood in the middle of the circle with his empty hands still raised over his head, staring at them.

Then the laughter started. One boy at the fence let out a short surprised bark, and it spread down the whole line like fire through dry grass. "He dropped it! He dropped his sword!" Somebody whistled. Somebody yelled, "Butterfingers, Penrose!" Students were doubled helplessly over the fence holding their stomachs, and even one of the instructors was trying very hard not to smile.

Aldous’s grey skin faded back to pale flesh, and his face went red, then white, then red again.

"Penrose." The oldest instructor had reached the edge of the circle, and his voice was cold. "The duel was called, and you raised your weapon after it. If you had not dropped it, you would be in front of the Headmaster tonight." He looked at the sword lying in the sand. "Thirty demerits. Leave the circle."

Aldous looked at the instructor, then at the laughing students, and then down at Aren, and his face twisted into something ugly.

[Aldous Penrose. Hostility: 52% → 74%.]

He turned and walked out, and the laughter followed him all the way to the gate.

’Seventy-four percent! And all I did was lie here.’

Aren stayed in the sand a moment longer, feeling the strength come back into his fingers one at a time, and then pushed himself up slowly, like a beaten boy, and limped out of the circle on his numb leg. Nobody helped him, because nobody was supposed to.

He didn’t see Mira again until supper. She was sitting at the far end of the Class D table with two girls from her duel group, laughing at something one of them had said, and when she saw him come in, her laugh stopped. She looked at him for one second across the long hall and then turned her back and went on talking.

He took his bread and ate it quietly alone on the dormitory steps.

He thought about Aldous Penrose standing in the white circle with his empty hands in the air, a Class B noble with a shaking sister and a reason now to hate him forever, and in his old life he would have called that a good afternoon’s work. Then he thought about Mira’s back, turned toward him at the far end of the table, and he didn’t know what to call that.

Tiller found him at the stables after dark.

"They came back to the dye house. Three of them, around sunset. The fence was still broken, so they went straight down into the cellar." He cracked a nut. "Took them about ten minutes. Sounded like hammering under the water. Then they came up and left. Didn’t look worried."

Aren let out a long breath. They had finished it. They had looked at their nail and seen their marks and gone away satisfied, and they hadn’t noticed one scraped line.

’Maybe. Still all I’ve got.’

Crane was waiting outside the scholarship dormitory when he got back, standing under the lamp by the door with his hands folded behind his back. He watched Aren limp slowly up the path without a word, and when Aren reached the door, he held out a folded piece of paper.

"Lady Ashgrave fights in the arena on the last night. She’s refused the Royal Knights. She’s refused her father’s guards. She’s refused everyone." His thin face gave nothing away. "But somebody will have to carry her sword case down to the arena and stand at the edge of the sand while she fights. A servant. Someone who isn’t a guard or a knight or anyone at all."

It was a pass, written permission to enter the arena on the last night of the Festival, signed and sealed.

"You told me to stay out of the arena, Professor."

"I did." Crane did not lower the paper. "And now I’m telling you to carry a sword case." A pause. "You do have the right class for it."

Aren took the pass, and Crane turned and walked off down the dark path without another word. Aren stood under the lamp holding the paper, unable to decide whether he had just been handed a gift or a trap.

He was beginning to suspect it was both.