Alex Lidell - The Cadet of Tildor

“He won’t.” Den looked toward the sand. “Jasper trained him not to.”

Savoy digested the thought while trumpets sounded and the crowd’s voices quieted to a dull roar. It was almost time. Squaring his shoulders, Savoy raised his face to challenge the room. And his heart froze.

In the second row of the middle section sat Renee and Diam.

Renee stilled her foot’s tapping. Yes, she was wasting time. And yes, the hours spent supporting Vipers’ sport were hours taken from her mission. But she had made a promise to Diam and it would not do to sulk over keeping her word. She was here. She might as well try and learn something.

Diam jerked forward, startling Renee from her train of thought. He pointed down, jostling a serving girl who scurried by with a mug-filled tray. Stale dark liquid sloshed into his lap. “Korish!” he yelled.

“What?” Renee threw her arms around the boy to keep him seated. The pounding of her heart drowned out the din of cheering drunks as her eyes followed Diam’s extended finger. She gasped. It was impossible. No, it wasn’t.

Savoy stood in the right-side holding pen, his eyes stoically sweeping the room. Centuries stretched on until all at once, their gazes met. She tensed, holding her breath. It lasted no more than a second, but then his head gave a small shake and turned away.

Beside her, Diam yelled for his brother. Renee clamped her hand over his mouth until he quieted. And then she cursed herself, digging her nails into her thighs. She should have known. Or speculated. Or found a bloody bookie and beat him into speaking. There was no better candidate for the Vipers’ games. Hadn’t Seaborn told her that? In all gods’ names, the Yellow Rose in Diam’s demand note was the same bloody Viper pit that sold fight tickets. She scrubbed her trembling palms over her face.

In the seat beside her, Diam regained all the self-control his eight-year-old self could muster and sat on his hands. “Why do they put barbed wire on the bars?”

Renee reined in her silent tirade and looked down through smoke-filled air to where vertical metal bars separated the fighters and spectators. The smooth rods rose seven spans—almost four times a man’s height—into the air to a crown of tangled barbs. The Vipers took no chances. “So no one climbs out,” she told him.

He squeezed her hand.

Music bellowed again while Renee wiped the sweat from her free hand on her thigh. Announcers shouted names and measurements, prompting bookies to close the records. A man holding a knotted rope’s end entered the cage, bowed, and pointed to the holding pens. Another roll of the drum. From Savoy’s side, a large man in white pants stepped onto the sand and gazed at the cheering crowd. On the left, a scrawny fighter in blue was shoved out, skidding to a halt in the sand.

The man in white, a bald behemoth, stopped walking and gazed about. His hand came up to his mouth and he sucked his knuckle. The referee bounced his rope-end. Once. Twice. Shouts of “Crush him, Boulder!” cascaded from the stands. The third time the referee raised his rope, he brought it down hard across the man’s bare shoulders. Boulder flinched and advanced toward his opponent.

The small man trembled. He covered his head with his hands, stretching skin taut over protruding ribs. Unlike the other Predators awaiting their turn, this one looked pitifully underfed.

“Excuse me, what are the odds?” Renee asked the spectator beside her.

“Three to one,” the woman answered.

Renee’s eyebrows rose. A one in three chance of Scrawny’s victory sounded beyond optimistic. “And if, er, Boulder wins?”

She frowned. “Of course he’ll win.”

“But the bet?”

“Can you not see it’s a death match? Boulder only fights death matches. Three he kills before the five-minute bell, one, after. On you go, Boulder! Move!”

Gods. Boulder now towered over his opponent, and still nothing happened. The growing din of the crowd encouraged the referee to use his rope’s end. Boulder roared, cocked back his ham of a fist, and waited too long. The small man launched forward, like a rabid cornered rat, aiming his fingers at Boulder’s eyes.

That was a mistake.

He missed the eyes, and Boulder’s massive hands closed around the man’s arm. He broke it, snapping the bone to a hideous angle. Then, wearing an expression of a pouting child, he struck his knuckles against the man’s nose. Again. And again. The wound opened wider with each blow. Blood gushed down Scrawy’s chin, onto his chest, and dripped out to the sand. Renee smelled the copper.

“I gotta be sick,” whispered a voice at her elbow. Even in this light, Diam’s face had taken on an unmistakable green tinge.

Grabbing hold of his arm, Renee ushered the boy toward the stairs, ignoring the curses of the spectators whose view they blocked as they passed. She should never have agreed to bring him.

They just made it. Khavi pounced on Diam the moment they emerged outside. The boy clutched his wolf’s fur—she could no longer think of Khavi as a dog—took a breath, and jerked away to retch onto the ground. Renee rubbed a circle on his back, grateful they left before he could see his brother pushed into the cage.

“Renee? Are you well?”

She jumped and turned at the sound of Jasper’s voice. The skinny mage closed the door behind him and adjusted his glasses. Khavi let out a low growl, but Renee welcomed a familiar face. “A bit more gruesome than expected. What brings you here?”

“You didn’t see me?” He looked disappointed when she shook her head. “In the right pen,” he prodded. “With the white pups. I’m their keeper.”

Renee’s mouth dried, as much from Jasper’s words as from the fear that Diam would blurt out Savoy’s identity. The child, however, remained silent and held Khavi’s fur in a death grip. She cleared her throat. “I wanted to see them fight, but . . . ” She jerked her head at Diam, and Jasper nodded in understanding. “What’s a keeper?” she asked.

“Me. I take care of them. Feeding, vet care, all that. I keep the trainer in check too, you know, or else he’d run the poor pups into the ground. If not for me, Den would’ve killed the newest one.”

“Amazing,” she managed. A thunderstorm after a week of drought. Gods, she should have considered Predator fights days ago. “That’s, well, unbelievable.”

“It’s true,” Jasper continued eagerly. “The new one, Cat, he won’t stop thanking me. Den’s hard on him, but that’s the trainer’s job, too, to be hard. I ensure it keeps under rein of reason.”

She cleared her throat. “Is Cat the blond-haired one? I wished to see him fight. He’s . . . pretty.”

“He is, isn’t he?” Jasper gleamed as if discussing a prized horse. “He’s fighting now, though, if you wish to hurry down to the pit.”

Renee pointed to Diam and turned up her palms. “I wish.” She took a breath. Nothing to lose. “Jasper? Do you think I could meet him, the pretty one? Can you do that?”

The boy smiled. “I can do most anything here. Take the wee man home and meet me here after the fight.”

Jasper wasn’t there when she returned. She waited. A quarter hour after the last of the spectators left the arena, a large man calling himself Den appeared at her side. He weighed her with his eyes, but beckoned her to follow.

“Did Cat win his fight?” Renee asked her escort.

“Yes,” he grunted, and said no more.

They walked down past the arena, through a door on the right, and into a corridor she recognized from her foray underground. At a juncture where she and Savoy had once headed east to find Diam—the stones where Renee first took a life were forever branded in her mind—they now turned west. A few more turns brought them to a closed door. Renee sketched the map in her mind.