Creusus's Arc

Chapter 17 of 21

The weight behind Creusus's ribs settled, and he knew what to do with it. He turned to the knight and set his palm on the black breastplate. The hum was still there, low and steady. Creusus matched it in his throat, then reached past the hum for the new thing under his ribs. He asked it for the arena. It answered like a door opening in a wall he had not seen. A dark frame rose in front of them, taller than a man, stone at its edges, nothing inside but black. Creusus took the knight by the arm and stepped through. They came out on the sand. The tiers rose around them. Banners hung where they had hung. The marshals stood where they had stood. No one gasped. No one pointed at the sky. To the crowd, no time had passed at all. The knight dropped at Creusus's feet, face down in the dust, armor loose on a smaller frame. Sir Syble lowered his hand from the signal he had been about to give and stared. A marshal walked out, knelt, and could not find a pulse he trusted. He looked up at Creusus and raised the winner's arm. Creusus let the arm go up. He watched the marshals lift the black helmet. Under it was the squire again, the boy's face, unaged, mouth slack, breathing shallow. The marshals murmured. Sir Syble came down onto the sand and looked hard at the boy, then at Creusus, then at the sealed paper still on the registrar's desk. He spoke to the head marshal in a low voice. The head marshal nodded once and turned to the crowd. The knight who had forced the bout was struck from every card. He would not fight in Embermere again. The reason went unspoken. The boy would be carried to the hospital. Creusus looked down at his hands. The bandages he had wrapped that morning were gone. In their place, his knuckles were bound in something that was not cloth. It was black the way the frame had been black, a black that ate the arena light and gave nothing back. He flexed his fingers. The wrappings moved like cloth. They were not cloth. The weight under his ribs stirred when he looked at them, pleased, and he made it lie down again. He crossed to where the marshals had lifted the squire onto a plank. The boy's eyes opened. They were only eyes now, no hum behind them, no void. The boy tried to speak and could not. His face bent around something that had no name yet, and Creusus understood it as pain, only pain, the ordinary kind a body carries after too long away from itself. Creusus set two black-wrapped fingers on the boy's shoulder and let them rest there while the marshals carried him out. He had won the bout. The tournament went on. The hands he would fight with next were not the hands he had come in with.