Scarlett Emberheart's Arc

Chapter 13 of 14

The hand closed around her at last. Not to crush. To hold. The fingers wrapped her the way petals wrap a bud, warm and firm, and Scarlett felt herself lifted faster. The pointer finger stretched up past her head and pressed at the seam of the sky. The seam split. A new tear opened above her, thin as a knife cut, showing black and stars behind it. Light poured through both ways. She shut her eyes. The air changed. It smelled like sawdust and sweat and hot iron. She knew that smell. She opened her eyes to the packed tiers of the arena, banners hanging limp, the sand below her scuffed from her own last bout. She was thirty feet up, cupped in a giant palm, and the tear behind her still glowed. The crowd saw her. A woman screamed. Then a hundred people screamed. Men in the front rows fell backward off their benches. A child pointed and could not stop pointing. The sound climbed and then cut off all at once, the way a struck bell dies, and the arena went silent. Scarlett looked down at her own hands and found them steady. She looked as stunned as any face in the stands. She turned her head. Across the sand, four guards were dragging Cedric Falterblade toward the north gate. His arms were bound. His feet skidded. His sword was gone. He was looking up at her with his mouth open, and his eyes were wet, and he was grinning like a boy who had found a lost dog. The hand felt her look. It moved. It bent at the wrist and lowered her, slow and careful, and set her down on the sand on her feet. The fingers uncurled. The palm lifted away. Then the hand shot across the arena at the guards. It went fast. The fingers spread like the legs of a spider crossing a table. The guards saw it coming and dropped Cedric in the dirt and ran. One tripped over his own sword belt. Another lost his helm. They cleared the gate in seconds and did not look back. The hand stopped over Cedric and hung there, fingers loose, waiting. Cedric sat up in the sand. He looked at the hand above him. He looked at Scarlett across the arena. His grin got wider. "You came back," he said. "I mean. You're back. I didn't think you would be." He wiped his nose on his bound wrists. He was still grinning. Scarlett stood on the sand in the ring she had won and could not win yet, poison gone from her legs, red hair loose around her helm, and every eye in Embermere on her. The tear in the sky above the arena held its light and did not close.