“Life, occasionally, presents us with impossible situations. Challenges which have no good answer, problems we cannot fix or even ameliorate. When there are no good paths open to us though, it’s is still essential that we carry on. Are all of your options terrible? Will every road lead to heartache and sorrow? So be it.
Sometimes there is no dodging the blows fate sends at us. Sometimes we must simply take them and know that whatever may come, there will be something beyond the pain which will be worth our enduring it.”
– Xindir Harshek Doxle of the First Flame at the first memorial service for the Great Calamity.
Idrina didn’t struggle at all. When one of the instructors explained the charges against her and the options which were on offer, she quietly nodded before accepting the Trial by Combat.
I don’t know if the instructors had been expecting that. Terrified pleading or outright offers of bribery were the responses almost any other cadet would have given. Idrina though seemed perfectly calm. Cadets who planned to simply sacrifice themselves might have been as still but anyone who was paying even the slightest attention to the energy which was coiled up deep within Idrina would not have made the mistake of thinking she had any thoughts of losing the battle before her.
The instructors didn’t care about any of that though and wasted no time from there, detaching Idrina’s restraints from the attachment points on the wall and marching her out towards the tourney field. Right before they left, she turned her head to glance at the stray patch of air where Mellina and I were standing cloaked in shadows and offered the ghost of a smile to us.
“We need to get back,” I said. “Holman’s going to lose his mind when he sees her in chains.”
“Let’s follow them,” Mellina said. “It’ll be quicker and they won’t be looking for us there.”
I wasn’t sure of that but she was the expert on sneaking places invisibly, so I would have been an idiot not to follow her lead.
As it turned out, both of us were right.
Mellina got us back to the others safe and sound, and when we got there Holman was indeed losing his mind.
“House Ironbriar objects to this on the strongest possible grounds!” He was yelling loud enough that even though Jalaren had dragged him off to the side of the tourney field and behind one of the partitions everything he said was clearly audible.
“She has agreed to the Trial,” Jalaren said. “Even if there was a better option, it’s too late to look for it.”
As arguments went, that was one of the least sensible ones possible. The fight hadn’t begun yet. There was clearly still plenty of time for a more reasonable course of action to be taken. The problem was the only one who wanted to be reasonable about this was Holman.
Well, I did too, but as was readily apparent, what a Cadet from a minor house wanted was utterly irrelevant as far as the Academy was concerned.
“It sounds like things didn’t go well?” Yarrin asked once Mellina dropped the shadows which were cloaking us.
“Better than I expected,” I said.
“So she’s not going to fight?” Ilyan asked.He sounded surprised but I think most of that came from the growing concern for his sister’s safety that I could see blooming in his whole body’s expression.
“She’s going to win,” I said. “She told us so.”
He stared at me. Then blinked. Then stared some more.
“And you believed her?” he asked, confusion tightening every muscle in his face as he tried to figure out if I’d lost all of my senses or just most of them.
“I do,” I said. “She’s been holding back. A lot with me and at least a little in her Trial.”
“That’s not true,” Ilyan said. “She always fights flat out. It’s why I can never beat her.”
“Yeah, I’m afraid to break it to you, but you can’t beat her because she’s not willing to lose to you, and she’s good enough that she doesn’t have to. You’re her brother though, you can’t tell me that you don’t know she loves you? No matter how hard you fight, I’m betting she’s never wanted to really hurt you.”
“What are you talking about? How could you…what makes you think any of that is true?”
“She didn’t mean to kill me,” I said. “And even when she did, she was holding back. Her moves are like a surgeons. She’s so fast its hard to see, but she doesn’t throw wild strikes out. She knows what she’s doing at all times. She just makes her decisions so fast that it’s hard not to see it as pure reflexes.”
“That’s not going to help her against an Imperial Knight,” Ilyan said. “They know how to fight fast people, and strong people, and everything else.”
“Do they?” I asked. “How many people like your sister do you think there are? How many of the Knights have fought anyone like her? And how often?” To his credit, Ilyan did seem to be considering that, so I went on. “Whoever they pick, they’re going to walk into that arena with the full confidence that they’ll be fighting a fledgling cadet. A talented one maybe, but how many of them do you think will start off aware of who and what they’re faced with?”
“They fight Reaving Beasts all the time though,” Ilyan said. “All they do is react to things that have unexpected powers and unknown levels of strength. They’re going to figure her out fast enough to make a different, fast enough to survive. If they couldn’t do that they’d never be able to fight the Reaving Beasts.” His view of what Reaving Beasts were and how they fought was shared by almost everybody in the Empire but it wasn’t true. I couldn’t tell him that, and I hoped dearly that the Imperial Knights were as taken in by their propaganda as he was because that would help Idrina immeasurably.
Ilyan couldn’t see that though.
“This isn’t going to be good,” he said, his whole body crestfallen.
“Of course not,” I said. “This is a fight to the death for absolutely no good reason. There’s nothing good here at all.”
“I’m going to stop it then,” Ilyan said. “I’ll tell them I did it.”
“Already volunteered to do that,” I said. “She shot me down.”
“Why?”
“Because if you walk up there and confess, all they’re going to do is put the two of you through a Trial,” Narla said. “Kati’s right. There’s no getting your sister out of this.”
“She seemed confident she could deal with it though,” Mellina said.
“Can she? Can you see her future?” Ilyan asked.
“No. Not a definite one,” Mellina said.
“What do you see then?”
Mellina closed her eyes.
“She’s standing over her opponent with one of her spears pining him through the heart to the ground. She is bleeding out after being sliced open from shoulder to hip. The fight is interrupted by the arrival of a Reaving Storm – that’s not a likely future – or the fight ends with her embracing a Reaving Beast who saves her life – also not likely, though I do keep seeing it, which is odd,” Mellina said, opening her eyes when I could tell it would be easy for her to continue.
“So she’ll be okay?” Ilyan asked.
“No, I can’t promise that. What I see isn’t the future, I explained that didn’t I? All I can see are things that might be. It’s like imagining what’s to come but there’s magic wrapped around it that makes it feel so much more real than it is. Believing in future visions though is the worst mistake you can make. They’re not real. Only the future we actually make is.”
“This sucks,” Ilyan said, his gaze cast down to ground, the posture failing to disguise the worry that was growing worse every second.
“I know. It does,” I said. “She asked us to believe in her though, so let’s give that a chance.”
“She is going to be insufferable if this works out for her,” he said, lifting his head and forcing a smile onto his face.
“She’s not already?” I asked which earned me a short laugh from him.
“Come on, they’re done setting up the dueling pit. Let’s give a front row seat,” I said. “We can watch her win better from there. Or break all the rules, jump in, and run away with her.”
“I like that. Keep our options open,” he said.
Getting to the front of the crowds wasn’t that hard. There weren’t that many cadets on the tourney field and the space they’d setup was large enough that there was plenty of room around it to view the battle to come.
I’d expected them to use ropes or have some kind of short walls setup as barriers but instead they’d defined the fighting area with a circle of the same burning silver powder that they’d used to wall Idrina into the prison.
“I wondered what those looked like,” Yarrin said, nodding to the silver circle. “I’ve read about True Silver Barriers before. They block magic and cause pretty horrible burns to anything that crosses them.”
Idrina and one of the Knights were already inside the barrier, which answered the question of how they were going to handle that obvious problem of having them cross it. They’d also taken Idrina’s shackles off, which was good. If they’d expected her to fight with them on, it would have been grounds for justifiable homicide on every authority figure present and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have been alone in the slaughterfest.
“Attention Cadets,” Jalaren said, his voice carrying over the chatter of the crowd despite a lack of magical amplification. “In place of the practical evaluations planned for this afternoon, we will instead be holding a Trial. The accusations are gathered into a charge of High Treason Against the Empire from the supporting charges of Destruction of Imperial Vital Property, the Summoning of Forbidden Entities, and Catastrophic Endangerment of the Population of an Imperial City.”
I glanced over at Yarrin.
“Summoning of Forbidden Entities?” I whispered.
“I heard that they’re saying she summoned the Reaving Beasts which were released,” he whispered back.
I shook my head, unable to process that at first.
It was such a blatant lie.
Did people think the Academy didn’t summon people from other worlds? Wasn’t it obvious? They’d done it in plain view during the Trials?
I had to ask someone about that. Doxle. I needed him to explain what the hell everyone was on about there. Grammy had never mentioned anyone purposefully summoning people from other worlds. From her stories, it was always Reaving Storms which rent the fabric of the world and let in creatures and people from beyond. The Imperial Knights and others were supposed to be the first and best line of defense against the ‘monsters’ which summoned by the storms, and the authority of the Houses rested at least partially on their ability to keep the populace safe from the unpredictable and all too destructive attacks which plagued the Empire in the wake of the Calamity three centuries back.
“The Accused is Cadet Idrina Ironbriar,” Jalaren said. “Her answer to these charges is a declaration of ‘Not Guilty’ and in defense of this answer has chosen Trial by Combat. Standing for the Prosecution will be the Imperial Knight Sir Reldin of Gold Phalanx. Because the charges are gathered together under the central accusation of High Treason, the trial may only end when one of the combatants lies dead or should the Accuser submit and yield the field.”
There was a general murmur of surprise at that. Apparently most of the cadets weren’t aware that the farce playing out before them was quite so serious. From the chatter which sprang up, it sounded like most had thought this was a staged event.
And of course some still did, for what sounded like a variety of reasons.
“Should the Accused be victorious in the trial, all charges against her will be rescinded with no further doubt laid against her and no blemish upon her honor,” Jalaren said as though required to explain an eventuality which would clearly never come to pass. “Should Sir Reldin be victorious then all charges will be confirmed as fact, even should resuscitation of the Accused prove to be viable. I would remind both combatants that several of the overseers are gifted with either healing or transformative magics and that, while this is a duel to the death, it is intended that resuscitation will be attempted at the conclusion in order to apply a more fitting punishment once guilt is determined.”
I groaned at that. He’d started off with at least the pretense that he was taking a neutral view on how the proceedings would play out but, probably like the rest of the instructors and the Imperial Knights, he wasn’t able to conceive of any ending except the obvious one.
I think everyone was probably watching Idrina when Jalaren said that, but I’m not sure if anyone else caught the small and deadly smile that crossed her lips.
She was ready for this.