“Strange bedfellows are the very best bedfellows.”

– Zindir Harshek Doxel of the First Flame

Mellina boarded a disc to float over to our box amid the thunderous whispering of applicants in the stands but none of them were able to see the exhaustion I saw in her eyes. When she stumbled getting into our spectator’s box, it didn’t come as a surprise so helping her transition from falling to sitting beside me wasn’t terribly hard. I placed her between Doxle and myself with the thought that we could shield her from any other stupidity the Cadets or the House representatives might try but the wink she gave me as she settled in suggested that wasn’t something I needed to be concerned about.

“I’m not part of the Chirurgeon Corp, but I believe those burns will need to be looked at,” Doxle said.

“Yeah. I hadn’t planned on those,” Mellina said.

“Plans are never all inclusive,” Doxle said. “Those which attempt to be exist merely to summon the most unlikely of misfortunes.”

“I thought Advisors were supposed to tell us how we could avoid repeating our mistakes,” Mellina said, gritting her teeth as a wave of pain swept through her.

“Oh, I can easily do that,” Doxle said. “Don’t apply for the Imperial Academy again. In fact, don’t apply for any sort of program where entrance is gated by a death battle.”

“This is his idea of being helpful,” I said.

“Not at all,” Doxle said. “My idea of being helpful looks like this.” He raised a hand over the Mellina’s should as though he was going to slap it.

“May I?” he asked.

When she nodded he did, in fact, slap her shoulder.

I came within half a second of ‘slapping’ him with a bared handful of claws except I noticed Mellina’s reaction wasn’t one of surprised pain. She sighed in relief in fact.

And her shoulder and arm were fine. No burns, no scars, no sign she’d been injured at all.

“Apologies for the dramatics,” Doxle said. “The magic I used is dangerous to place within you for too long.”

I was ready to nod and accept that as a reasonable explanation for all of three seconds  before an obvious question raised itself in my mind.

“I thought you drew your power from mine?” I said.

“I do drain power from you, yes,” Doxle said. 

“Are you saying my power is dangerous to other people?”

“Were you under the impression that it’s not? If so there are the remains of a Cadet in a several different buckets which could serve as a rather illuminating example of the perils of underestimating what you can do.”

“That’s different,” I said. “He deserved that.”

“No. He deserved far worse. What you did to him isn’t the example however. It’s that you were capable of doing that to him after the damage he inflicted,” Doxle said. “You said your magic had difficulty dealing with the wounds he inflicted. I believe that surviving those wounds was likely meant to be impossible and that the designers of the blade he wielded are going to be most interested in you in the days ahead.”

“Days? Not weeks or months?”

“Oh, they won’t have long to examine you,” Doxle said. “Their new development proved to be a failure and that is going to bring some rather ugly penalties against them from the people they had convinced the project was ready.”

I shrugged. If more people were coming after me then I’d deal with them. It wasn’t like I would have a choice in that, though I might have a choice in how I tried to make sure that they wouldn’t come after me more than once.

I didn’t spend much timing thinking about that. There were more important things to deal with.

“How are you doing?” I asked, trying to catch Mellina’s gaze.

“That really worked. My shoulder feels fantastic now,” she said, rotating her arm as though testing for any remaining twinges of burn pain.

“Not what I meant,” I said. “How are you doing?”

She could have said ‘fine’. It’s what I probably would have done. Mellina however was less of an idiot than I am.

“Oh. I’m terrified,” she said. “My family let me take apply to the Academy because they thought it would make me a more valuable contributor to whichever project they assigned me too. Breaking away from them was not something any of them would have foreseen.”

“I thought prophecy magic doesn’t actually work?” I said, not sure why House Astrologia would be investing any trust in precognition after centuries of disappointments.

“It’s more complicated than that,” Mellina said. “I’m not supposed to go into much detail, so I’ll explain later when there are fewer ears around.

I glanced over at Doxle, wondering if she was concerned with revealing House secrets to an Advisor.

“She means the Cadets and the other Houses,” he said. “I am quite painfully conversant in the limitations and opportunities casters face when dealing with temporal viewing magics, in part because I’ve lost count of how many of the members of House Astrologia I’ve taught over the last few centuries.”

He fell silent which told me he was lying by omission, though I couldn’t tell what it was he was omitting.

I puzzled away at that, and at anything I could offer to Mellina but I came up with nothing on either front. It would have been nice to blame that on my scrambled brains, but if I was being honest with myself, neither guessing hidden motivations nor providing comfort for very real and well founded worries were skills I was particularly talented at.

The next match finished up with both fighters winded but intact. Or maybe it was two matches after Mellinas, I’d lost track of time and what was going on while we’d been talking and since I hadn’t smelled any blood nothing bad enough had happened to drag my attention into the present moment.

I was waiting for one particular name to be called but it took over twenty four matches before Yarrin was brought in to the arena. Of those twenty four, two were obviously thrown by the Cadets to allow the wealthy applicants to get into the Academy with a minimum of fuss. Another half dozen seemed like the Cadets were pulling their punches though they put on a better show for it. The rest were honest matches, with eight of the applicants being forced to step into the black quadrant and failing to receive sponsorship, where another four stepped into the black and had one of the Great Houses speak for them anyways, probably due to how they did on the other trials. The remaining four fought what I thought were good battles. It clearly wasn’t easy for them to hang on and none of them were particularly flashy about it but they all managed to survive without major injuries and racked up enough points for spending time in the blue or red quadrants that multiple Houses bid on them. 

And then it was Yarrin’s turn.

I considered simply leaping into the arena the moment he arrived on the platform. Jalaren would probably object. The Cadet Yarrin had to fight would definitely object. Whether I would care about those objections was a question I didn’t have the answer to.

If it meant not having to watch someone else I knew die, then I was pretty sure the answer was ‘no, I did not care if anyone else’s precious sensibilities were bruised’. I held back though, partly out of the misplaced belief that if something went wrong I’d be ready for it this time and partly because of a feeling I couldn’t articulate that Yarrin deserved a chance to stand on his own.

That his opponent was the same Cadet who’d faced Idrina should have trashed both of the reasons I stayed in my seat. I was definitely not fast enough to stop him from killing Yarrin from where I was and Yarrin had shown nothing like a skill or spell on par with Idrina.

A whistle blew to start the match and I flinched from the shower of blood I expected to see.

Instead of blood though, there was the clang of steel. Yarrin had blocked the Cadet’s first swing. And his second. And riposted against the third.

But something wasn’t right.

Or maybe it wasn’t wrong?

The Cadet wasn’t moving like he had against Idrina. He was still pushing Yarrin harder than Yarrin could keep up with, but his blows were easily less than half the speed they’d been when he fought Idrina.

And he was telegraphing them more.

It wasn’t obvious, and it didn’t look like he meant to throw the match. Any of the strikes he made would have seriously injured Yarrin if Yarrin’s desperate defenses were a fraction of a second slower. 

As it was, the Cadet backed Yarrin into the blue quadrant where physical combat earned Yarrin nothing and then steadily into the black with Yarrin only managing to ward off the blows the Cadet threw by continually yielding ground and dodging towards the black quadrant at every opportunity.

The moment Yarrin stepped foot into the black, the Cadet put up his sword and stepped back. He’d beaten Yarrin cleanly and quickly and used no flashy blasts of magic, and no exceptional feats of speed or strength. At the same time though he hadn’t damaged Yarrin outside of a few light cuts on the arms and legs from the times when Yarrin had only been mostly fast enough to block a complicated series of blows.

“This match has ended in forfeit,” Proctor Jalaren said. “Are there any who will speak for this applicant in spite of their failure.”

It was the same language he’d used for the other applicants who’d reached the black. This time however only silence was the response. I saw Yarrin’s shoulders slump at that and it didn’t look like relief.

“House Riverbond will speak for this applicant,” I said and added, “If he wishes us too.”

People had forgotten I existed I think, or maybe hadn’t recognized that I’d fought with Yarrin in the first challenge and weren’t expecting me to speak up for him after I’d let other black quadrant applicants be dismissed without a word.

“We have a conditional offer,” Jalaren said with a not subtle shake of his head. “Will the applicant accept?”

“The applicant gratefully accepts and formally pledges himself to House Riverbond,” Yarrin said.

“Oh, that’s interesting,” Mellina said, with an expression of being lost in thought.

“Should I not have done that?” I whispered.

Doxle chuckled in response.

“Probably not but it is delightful that you did,” he said.

“It’s going to lead to even more trouble isn’t it?”

“Of course,” Doxle said. “Everything that’s truly worth doing does.”

“Should I ask if we have the money for me to do it again?”

“Of course not,” Doxle said. “Money is as much of a problem as you allow the rules to tell you that it is.”

Yarrin arrived at our spectator’s box before I could press the matter further and the first thing he did was offer me a formal bow.

“I apologize for presuming that pledging to your House would be acceptable,” he said, taking the seat on the other side of me from Mellina when I gestured to it.

“No apology needed. We’re not much of a House at the moment though,” I said.

“You don’t seem to be likely to kill me for being an embarrassment. That’s more of a House than I had when I entered the arena,” Yarrin said, and I understood a lot more about him.

I nodded and said nothing. I thought about killing some of his immediate family, but that seemed like it would be counterproductive.

My thoughts had been running towards homicide more than I was used to, and that didn’t change with the next applicant.

It wasn’t anything about her though. She was amazing. Easily half again my height and probably four times my mass, but it was the sheer confidence she radiated as she stepped off her hover disc that caught my attention the most. 

What turned my thoughts back to homicide was, predictably, her opponent.

“I can’t believe the disc could float all that,” he said, and the crowd laughed with him.

Seriously, I would be doing the world a favor to just jump into one end of the Cadet box and not stop tearing bodies apart till I reached the other end.

Narla however didn’t seem to care. I’d caught her name when Jalaren called it out and dismissed her at first because she was yet another Lightstone. 

The Cadet produced twin columns of fire from his hands and forged them into sharply curved sabers.

“Looks like we’re going to have roast pig tonight,” he said just before the whistle blew.

Narla extended one arm and waved her fingers in a ‘come on over here’ gesture, which the Cadet was eager to do anyways.

He charged raising his fire sabers high for what would have been a pair of slashes to her throat.

And she punched him.

No wind up. No particular effort involved. Just a step forward and a good solid punch.

The Cadet’s body flew off to the platform and if the punch hadn’t crushed all of the organs in his chest, I was pretty sure from the crunch at the end of his fall there wasn’t a lot of functional parts of him left.

Having just taken a fall like that I did feel a small bit of sympathy for him, but avoiding that fate would have been so simple. Idiot.

Narla stepped back and bowed to Jalaren before turning to the House Representatives.

“Well, that match is ended,” Jalaren said, clearly surprised at how brief it had been. “Will anyone speak for this applicant?”

“House Lightstone will speak for her,” her House rep said.

She waited a moment before turning in a direction that was suspiciously close to facing me.

“Sorry Gramps, I’m not interested,” she said. “Riverbond killed my brother. I want to be in her House!”