Creusus set his bare hand on the registration desk and said his name once. Brogan Ironquill did not look up. He was sorting entries, and his back hurt, and he had no patience for a man who arrived without a sword, without armor, and without a sponsor's page pinned to his form. "No blade," Creusus said. "No mail. Just me." Brogan lifted his eyes then, took in the shaved head, the wrapped knuckles, the bare chest under an open coat, and grunted. "Fools die faster," he said. "Fee's the same. Sign." Creusus signed. He meant to win the grand tournament of Embermere with his fists, and he had come to the desk to make that promise binding. The first bout came before the sun was high. His opponent was a squire in dented plate, a boy barely old enough to grow stubble, drawn against him by lot. The boy's sword was too long for his arm. That was the problem Creusus had carried since the training post: he could not measure a swung blade by eye. He knew the length of a fist. He did not know the length of steel in motion. One misread step in the ring meant a cut he would never see coming. So he did not step. He stayed close. Each time the squire swung, Creusus drove the flat aside with the heel of his wrapped hand, taking the shock on bone and cloth. The boy's breathing changed. His swings got faster, then wilder, then wrong. Something behind his eyes lit up, a shine that did not belong on a squire's face. Creusus felt the air around the boy grow tight, the way a rope grows tight before it snaps. He did not wait to learn what it meant. He slapped the blade wide, and the sword flew from the squire's grip and skidded across the sand. Creusus stepped in and threw a single straight punch to the jaw. It landed clean. The squire's head snapped back. In the same instant a wave hit Creusus in the chest and lifted him off his feet. He flew backward and struck the sand hard. When he looked up, the boy was gone. Not fallen. Gone. The armor was gone with him. The sword lay alone on the ground, and the crowd in the stone tiers had stopped making noise. Creusus pushed to his knees. His knuckles were bleeding through the wraps. He had won the match. He had also learned, in one punch, that the ring held things his fists were not built for, and that the next opponent might not vanish so kindly.

Creusus walked out of the arena with the crowd still silent behind him. He did not go to the barracks. He went to a bench under the stone tiers and unwrapped his knuckles to look at the cuts. That was where he first heard the numbers. Two men in clean tunics stood by the archway, talking loud enough for a fighter to hear on purpose. Odds against the bald brute were four to one and climbing. A sponsored favorite had put gold on it. And, one of them added, the favorite had put more gold on a side arrangement: three men, a quiet alley, and a hammer for the brute's hands before the next bout. Creusus finished wrapping his hands again. He did not go back to the training post, and he did not seek a guard. He walked out through the arena's front gate while the sun was still up, because men who plan to break hands prefer the dark. He wanted them to come now, where he could see them. He picked a narrow lane between two market stalls and stopped in the middle of it. He waited. They came within the hour. Three of them, as promised. One carried a smith's hammer down along his leg. The other two carried short clubs. They spread to block both ends of the lane. The one with the hammer told him to hold out his hands and it would be quick. Creusus held out his hands. When the man stepped in, Creusus caught the hammer shaft against his wrapped palm, drove his other fist into the man's throat, and took the hammer as the body dropped. He did not use it. He set it on the ground. The club on his left swung for his temple. He ducked under the arc, hit the ribs, hit the jaw, and stepped over him toward the last one. That one ran. Creusus let him run. He wanted a witness who would carry the story back to whoever had paid. He walked back to the arena with his knuckles bleeding through fresh cloth. Brogan Ironquill was still at the desk. Creusus set the smith's hammer on the wood between them and said he wanted it entered into the record that three men had tried to break his hands in the market lane, and that two of them were still lying there. Brogan looked at the hammer, then at the bandages, then wrote it down without a word. Word moved faster than ink. By evening the odds against him had shortened, and the sponsored favorite had withdrawn a purse from the bettors' table. Creusus had kept his hands. He had also told every fighter in Embermere that the cheap way to stop him was closed, and that the next attempt would have to come inside the ring.

The next morning Creusus went looking for a man who fought with a sword. He had learned in the alley that his fists worked when he could see the blow coming. In the ring, a blade would come faster. He walked to the training grounds behind the arena and stopped at a lane where an older fighter drilled alone against a straw target. The man had gray at his temples and a nick in one ear. Creusus said he needed to learn how a sword moves before the next bout. The man looked at his bare chest and his wrapped hands and asked what he would pay. Creusus said he would take the bruises for both of them. The man laughed once and picked up a wooden blade. They worked from the first horn to the second. The man showed him the line a cut travels from the shoulder, and the shorter line from the wrist. He showed him where a thrust starts and where it has to pass. He swung slow, then faster, then at full speed. Creusus caught the wooden blade against his forearm on the third try, on the flat, the way he had been shown. By midday he was catching it clean. By afternoon he was stepping inside the arc before it finished and pinning the man's wrist against his own chest. The man stopped and rubbed his shoulder and said he had taught this drill for twenty years and never seen a student find the inside of it before dusk on the first day. Creusus did not answer. He set his feet and asked for another pass. He could not read the notices pinned on the gate and he could not count past the fingers on both hands, but he had watched the wooden blade a hundred times now and his body already knew where it would be. When the man finally called the day and lowered the practice sword, Creusus had a bruise the length of his forearm and a map in his head for how a blade reaches a man. He wrapped his knuckles again at the bench by the gate. The next fighter in the bracket carried steel. Now Creusus knew where the steel had to travel to reach him, and how little of that path he needed to close.

For three days Creusus worked the post and the wooden blade. He hired the older fighter again and paid him in bruises. He drilled the inside step until his shoulder went numb. He wrapped his knuckles at dawn and unwrapped them at dark. By the third night he could catch the practice sword blind, by sound alone. He slept well. He ate. He walked to the arena at second horn feeling ready for anything a man with steel could show him. Then he crossed the sand and saw the figure waiting on the far mark, and the ease went out of his chest. The knight stood in black plate from boot to gorget. A purple plume rose from the helm. The visor showed no face. The sword hung at his side, long and clean, the point resting in the sand. Creusus had heard the rumor in the bunk lane the night before. Marshals had tried to strike the bout from the card after the squire vanished. This man had walked into the registrar's room with a sealed paper and made them put it back. Creusus was standing here because the knight wanted him standing here. The horn blew. Creusus raised his wrapped hands and set his feet the way the old man had shown him. He waited for the first cut so he could read it. The knight did not cut. The knight took one step forward, then another, unhurried, the sword still low, the plume steady. No shoulder tell. No wrist tell. Nothing to read. Creusus gave ground. He had never given ground in a ring before. His heel found the chalk line and he stepped over it and gave more. The knight kept walking. The crowd noise thinned to a hum inside the helm Creusus was not wearing. He had trained for a blade that traveled. This blade was not traveling. It was only coming closer, held by a man who did not seem to care whether Creusus was ready. Creusus circled left and made himself stop backing. He lowered his hands a finger's width and set his weight over his front foot. He would take the first strike on his forearm the way he had drilled it, whenever it finally came. The knight closed to sword length and stopped. The point lifted from the sand for the first time. Creusus watched the tip and understood, in the space of one breath, that everything he had prepared for the last three days had been the wrong lesson.

The point lifted and Creusus moved. He shifted off the line as the knight brought the sword down in a heavy overhand cut. The blade came fast and straight, no wrist flick, no false start. Creusus rolled his shoulder past it and felt the wind of the steel against his ribs. He came up outside the knight's sword arm and threw a short hook at the gorget. His knuckles skipped off the black plate and stung all the way to his elbow. The knight was already turning. The second cut came down the same way. So did the third. Creusus stopped trying to hit and started trying to read. Every strike began at the shoulder and ended at the sand. Heavy. Downward. Readable. He could see each one leaving the helm's shadow before it moved. That was the trick, and it was not a kind trick. Reading the strike did not make the strike safe. The knight had picked one pattern and dared him to solve it inside a ring the width of a stall floor. Creusus rolled under the fourth cut and felt the blade pass a hand above his skull. He rolled under the fifth and his knee scraped chalk. He was giving ground again. The tiers above the arena had gone quiet the way a crowd goes quiet when it thinks it knows the ending. Creusus set his back foot and told himself the next cut, he would step in instead of out. He did not step in. The sword came down. He rolled. The tip caught the top of his forearm as he came up, a graze so light he only felt the metal itself, cold, the way a razor feels before the blood. The hair on his arm went with it. No cut. No sting. Just the touch of the edge and gone. His whole body rang. Not the arm. All of him, the base of the skull, the teeth, the soles of his feet inside his boots. He had felt this before. He knew he had felt this before and could not say where. The squire in the first bout. The wave of force when the boy vanished with his armor. That same low hum sitting inside his bones now, like a bell that had been struck days ago and never stopped. Creusus stumbled back two steps and kept his hands up. The knight did not press. The knight raised the sword to the shoulder again, the same starting mark, patient. Creusus stared at the plume and the empty visor and understood what he had learned. The pattern was not the weapon. The blade was. And the blade was doing something to him that had nothing to do with cuts. He had survived the round. He had also been touched, and being touched had cost him something he could not yet count.

The knight lifted the sword to the shoulder again. Same mark. Same patient start. Creusus stood in the sand with his bones still humming and knew he could not keep rolling. Another graze would take more of whatever the first had taken. He wiped his palm on his belt and watched the black plate, and this time he did not watch the blade at all. The knight cut. Creusus rolled outside and came up close, and while the sword was still traveling he looked at the gauntlet on the hilt. The fingers. The way they set and reset before the shoulder moved. He had seen those fingers before. Not the size, not the reach. The small clean grip. The knuckles that closed one at a time from the outside in. He had watched a boy hold a practice sword that way three bouts ago, right before a single punch put him on his back and a wave of force took him out of the world. It was the same hand. Older. Bigger. Same hand. Creusus decided to test it. He set his back foot into the sand and pulled from the hip, the way he pulled at the post when no one was watching. He let the knight begin the sixth cut and stepped inside it. The sword came down past his shoulder and bit only air. He drove up under the visor with everything he had, aiming past the strike, past the man, at the helmet itself. His wrapped knuckles struck the side of the helm above the ear. The ring came back the instant his skin touched the metal, worse than before, up his arm and into his teeth like a bell swung against his skull. His knees almost went. The helm did not. It turned on the gorget, tipped, and slid off the head beneath it and dropped into the sand. Creusus stumbled back and made himself look. The face inside the black plate was the squire's face. Older by years he had not lived. The soft cheeks were gone. The jaw had set. The brown eyes were the same eyes that had looked up at him from the chalk before the wave took the boy away. The boy who had vanished was standing in front of him in a man's armor, holding a sword that fed on him every time it touched him. The crowd in the tiers made a sound Creusus did not hear. He kept his fists up. The helm lay between them in the sand. The knight did not pick it up. The knight lifted the sword to the shoulder again, and Creusus understood the bout had only now begun.

The knight lifted the sword again and cut. Creusus rolled out and came up on the balls of his feet. He no longer watched the blade. He watched the shoulders. The knight moved the same as the last pass, and the one before, and Creusus began to think the older face had not brought older habits with it. Then the sword came faster. The next cut arrived before Creusus had set his weight, and he barely turned his hip in time to let it pass. The one after that whistled where his ear had been. Whatever the boy had lost in years, the man had gained in speed. High above the sand, in the shaded box that overlooked the field, the marshals leaned together. Sir Syble stood at the rail with his cape gathered in one fist. He had watched the helm come off. He had seen the face inside. He knew the boy who wore that face three bouts ago, and he knew a boy did not age six years between horns. He spoke low to the men beside him. One shook his head. Another pointed at the sealed paper on the table. Sir Syble looked down at the stone tiers, at the banners hung along the rail, at the two figures in the sand, and gave the sign to blow the horn. The bout would end now. Nothing here was clean. The horn blew. The sound rolled across the arena and hung there. Creusus dropped his fists and stepped back, breath sawing. The knight did not step back. The knight raised the sword, turned the point down, and drove it into the sand at his own feet. Then his gauntlets went to the belt and unbuckled the scabbard and let it fall. He came at Creusus with bare fists inside black steel. Creusus laughed. One short bark. He had asked the tournament for this and the tournament had given it. He set his stance and threw the first punch he trusted, straight from the hip, into the side of the knight's jaw. The head barely moved. The knight hit him back in the ribs and the ringing came up through his body like a struck bell. Creusus staggered. The ring was not in the sword now. It was in the man. Every knuckle that touched the black plate poured the same drain into him that the blade had, and the plate was everywhere. He swung again and took another to the ribs and felt his legs go warm and loose beneath him. Above the rail Sir Syble was shouting at the marshals and no one was moving to the sand. The horn had blown and the fight had not ended. Creusus lifted his fists and stepped in anyway, because the bout was his to finish, and the burning under his skin climbed toward his heart.

Creusus pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth and listened. Under the ringing in his skull there was a pitch, a low steady note the black plate poured into him with every touch. He had heard it in the sword. He heard it now in the man. He filled his chest and hummed. Low. Deeper than his own voice wanted to go. He matched the note under his ribs to the note the knight was pushing into him, and the ringing in his ears thinned. His legs came back under him. One breath. Two. The knight cocked a fist for the blow that would end it, and the shoulder telegraphed the strike the way it had in the first pass, before the speed came. The speed was in the drain. Kill the drain, kill the speed. Creusus stepped inside the punch and threw everything he had left from the hip. His bandaged knuckles landed clean on the jaw, humming as they struck. The head snapped sideways inside the helm. The knight's knees folded. Creusus did not let him fall. He caught the black pauldron in one hand and the belt in the other and held on, still humming, chest against the cold plate. The wave came the way it had come for the squire. He felt the arena go out from under his feet like a floor dropped through. Sand, horn, banners, the shouting from the marshals' box, all of it pulled away. There was no light. There was the knight's weight in his arms and the note in his own chest and nothing else. Creusus kept humming into the dark. Wherever the tournament sent the ones it took, he had gone with it, and he had brought the knight with him.

Creusus let the weight in his arms go. The armor hit ground he could not see and rang once, a flat clang that told him nothing about the room. He stood over the sound and waited for the note in his chest to fade. It took a long time. The hum bled out of his ribs by slow degrees, and the ache came in behind it. His knuckles throbbed inside the bandages. His legs shook. He put one hand out and found no wall. He shuffled a step and found no wall. The dark was even on every side, not a seam of light anywhere, not under a door, not above. He sat down beside the knight because standing was worse. His head dropped. He meant to listen. Instead his body took the choice from him and he went out. He woke to the scrape of plate on stone close to his ear and rolled back before he was fully awake. "Don't move," the knight said. One phrase, flat, muffled by the helm. Creusus froze on his elbows. He heard the knight working at something, buckles maybe, a pouch. Steel tapped steel. Then a small flame bloomed in the knight's gauntlet, no bigger than a thumb, and hung there. It lit the knight's chest and the underside of the helm and nothing else. No floor showed. No wall. The light stopped at the edge of the knight's reach as if the dark ate it. The knight turned the flame toward Creusus once, so Creusus could see the hand holding it, then turned it away and lifted it and began to walk. He did not speak again. He beckoned once with the free hand. Creusus pushed to his feet. Every joint complained. He followed the small light because it was the only thing in the world to follow, and because the man carrying it had said the one thing that mattered, which was that there was somewhere not to move and, by implication, somewhere to go. He kept a pace behind the plate and watched the back of the helm bob in the little circle of fire. The floor under his bare feet was smooth and cold and gave back no echo. He did not hum. He did not need to. The knight was leading him now.

The knight stopped walking. Creusus almost bumped the plate before he caught himself. The little flame in the gauntlet was still too small. It showed the knight's hand and the front of the helm and nothing past that. Creusus could hear something moving beyond the light. Not footsteps. A slow drag, like cloth pulled over stone, circling wide. He put his back near the knight's back and set his weight low. He waited for the knight to lift the flame higher. The knight did not. Instead the knight drew the sword. The knight slammed the blade point-first into the ground. The ring went out from the steel in a long clean note, louder than any hum Creusus had matched before. The dark answered. It gathered. Creusus watched the black around them pull inward like water finding a drain, thickening, taking on edges, until a shape stood a few paces off. It had a head and shoulders and a long trailing body that never finished. It was not lit by the flame. It was lit by nothing. It was there the way a hole is there. Creusus wondered why the knight had waited so long to strike the ground, and had no answer, and let the question go. His fists came up on their own. The bandages pulled tight across his knuckles. The shape tilted its head. When it spoke, the sound arrived inside Creusus's chest, not his ears. "My knight. You have returned. And you have brought the true king." Creusus looked at the knight. The knight stared straight ahead at the shape and said nothing. Creusus's mouth went dry. He was no king. He was a man with wrapped hands who had followed a stranger into a room without walls. He opened his mouth to say so and closed it. The shape had not asked him a question. It had named him. The knight lowered his head one small degree, the way a man bows who does not want to bow. The flame in the gauntlet guttered and held. Creusus understood two things at once. The knight had brought him here on purpose. And whatever waited in this place had been waiting for him, not for the knight. He set his feet. He did not lower his fists. He said, "I'm not your king." His voice sounded flat in the dead air. The shape did not move. The knight did not move. The ringing from the sword faded out of the ground and left only the sound of Creusus breathing. He had followed the light this far. The light had brought him to a door he did not choose to open, and the door was open now, and he stood inside it with nothing but his hands.

Creusus kept his fists up. The shape had not moved. The knight had not moved. He turned his head a small degree toward the black helm beside him and spoke through his teeth. "You brought me here. You owe me why." The flame in the gauntlet did not waver. For a long breath he thought the knight would stay silent, the way he had stayed silent through every step of the walk. Then the helm turned toward him. The visor was empty inside. The voice that came out of it was flat and dry, like a board dragged over sand. "I was the squire." Creusus's jaw tightened. He kept his hands where they were. The knight went on in the same dead tone. "You knocked me down in the arena. The wave took me. It brought me here." He lifted the small flame a little, as if to show the dark around them. "There is no floor here. There is no sky. There are things that walk. I walked with them. I do not know how long. Years. More than years. I saw every thing a man can be afraid of. I saw them come for me one at a time. Then all at once." His gauntlet closed slowly. "The void let me go. It gave no reason. It set me back in your world older, and it put this armor on me, and it sent me to fight you again." Creusus said nothing. The shape behind them watched. The knight's voice did not rise. "Every hour I stood in that place, I stood there because of your fist. I wanted to kill you. I carried that want across the walk back. I carried it into the arena." The helm tilted a fraction. "I am standing next to you now and I cannot find it. Something in this place has taken it out of me. I feel nothing. I want nothing. I am telling you because you asked." He lowered the flame. "That is the answer. There is no more." Creusus lowered his fists. Not all the way. Enough. He looked at the black shape past the flame and then back at the empty visor. He had come here thinking a man had wronged him and needed answering. He saw now it ran the other way. He had knocked a boy into a hole and the hole had kept him. The tournament had done that. The thing that ran the tournament had done that. He said, "Then we go back. Both of us. And I finish what you were sent to stop." The knight did not answer. He turned toward the shape and set the flame between them like a small wall. Creusus set his feet beside the plate. Whatever came next, he would meet it with the knight on his shoulder, not across from him.

Creusus turned to face the shape. He kept his fists loose at his sides now. The knight stood a pace behind with the small flame. "You called me king," Creusus said. "Tell me what that means. Tell me how I stand in your dark and breathe." The shape did not answer with sound. It answered inside him. A weight pressed behind his eyes and set words there without asking. He saw a place ruled by a man. He saw the man on a seat. He saw the face and it was his own. He stepped back. "No." He said it to the shape and to the pressure and to the picture it had put in him. "Say it plain. Not in my head. Out here." The shape gave nothing more. The knowledge stopped where it stopped, like a bucket run dry. Creusus pressed. "How did I come here. Why me. What am I to you." The dark held. The flame in the gauntlet bent once and steadied. Whatever the shape had to give, it had given. Then the floor became a floor. Stone rose under his bare feet without sound. Walls climbed on four sides in black and grey. A long room opened around them with pillars he had not seen laid. At the far end a seat stood on a low step. A man sat on the seat. The man had no hair and no beard. The man was thick through the shoulders. The man had his hands wrapped in clean linen at the knuckles. Creusus stopped walking. His breath went shallow. The knight stood where he had stood, flame still lit, as if the room had grown around him and left him untouched. "That is not me," Creusus said. He spoke to the room. He spoke to the shape he could no longer see. "That is your dark wearing my face. Nothing more." The man on the seat lifted his head. He looked at Creusus with Creusus's own eyes. He shook his head once, slow, the way a father corrects a child who has counted wrong. "I am you," the man said. His voice was Creusus's voice. "I have been here the whole time." Creusus's hands came up on their own. The linen at his knuckles felt suddenly tight. Behind him the knight said nothing. The flame did not move. Creusus stared at the seated man and could not make his mouth work to answer.

Creusus found his voice. "Who are you, then. Say it clean." The seated man set his wrapped hands on his knees. He did not stand. "I am the piece that stayed," he said. "A knight came to this hall a thousand years back. Not the knight behind you. Another one, wearing the same plate, carrying the same blade, out of a road that ran beside yours and never touched it." Creusus glanced back. The knight held the small flame steady. The knight did not move. The seated man went on. "His sword struck me here, on this floor. The blow rang through me and split a piece off. That piece was you. The rift took the piece and threw it across into the road the other knight came from. You grew up there. You learned the post. You learned the linen from the old man at the docks. You did not know you had been cut off from anything." Creusus's hands stayed up. He lowered them a finger at a time. "And the knight at my back." "The same knight," the seated man said. "From the road you were thrown into. He followed you here because you struck him and the strike carried him the way the sword carried you. Two halves of one event, walking back to the room where it happened. You had to be aware. Both of you. That was the price of the door." Creusus stepped forward once. The floor held. He watched the seated man's chest rise and fall in the same rhythm as his own. He reached out and pressed two fingers to the linen at the seated man's knuckle. The linen was warm. The hand was solid. No illusion gave back heat like that. "You are real," Creusus said. The seated man nodded. "So am I," Creusus said. "Both of us, then." He drew his hand back. He turned to the knight. The knight tilted his helm a fraction. That was answer enough. Creusus faced the seat,”I have a bout to finish, send me back!”

The seated man did not rise. He looked at Creusus the way a man looks at a tool he set down long ago. "No," he said. "You will not go back. Not as two." Creusus kept his hands up. "Then send us both. I have a bout on the card." "You have no card," the seated man said. "You have a borrowed life on a borrowed road. The pieces must come whole again. That is the only door out of this hall." He stood then, slow, and the linen on his knuckles matched Creusus's own. "I am Diablo. Not a name you were told at the docks. The name under the name. A thousand years I have sat here missing a piece of my body. You are that piece. Come home." Creusus shook his head once. "I am a man. I have my fists. That is all." "You are a hand I lost," Diablo said. "I will fold you back in. It will take longer than it took the knight, because you did not spend those years in the void being scoured. But I will enjoy every hour of the work. When it is done, you will not remember the post or the old man's linen. You will remember only me." He raised one wrapped hand. Creusus felt a pull start under his ribs, low and steady, like a rope drawn hand over hand through his chest. He set his feet. He threw a straight punch at Diablo's jaw. His fist stopped a hand's width from the face and hung there. The pull tightened. His knees bent without him bending them. He hummed, the same frequency that had broken the armor's hold, and the hum came out thin and wrong, as if the air in the hall would not carry it. He turned his head. The knight stood where he had stood, flame in one hand, sword in the other. The knight did not move. Creusus opened his mouth to call him and no sound came. The pull dragged a piece loose behind his sternum. He felt it slide toward the seated man like iron toward a lodestone. He drove his heel back into the stone to hold ground. The stone did not care. His wrapped fist trembled in the air, still a hand's width from Diablo's jaw, closer now by a finger, then two. Diablo smiled without moving his mouth. "Slower is better," he said. "I have the time." Creusus's vision narrowed to the linen on his own knuckles. He watched a thread of it fray and lift, drawn toward the seated man. He was still on his feet. He was still himself. But less of him, and the pull had not stopped.

Creusus watched the thread of linen lift from his knuckle and drift toward the seated man. He watched it and did not look away. The linen was his. The old man at the docks had shown him the wrap, year after year, until his hands learned it without asking. That was his. Not Diablo's. He held that fact in his head like a stone in a fist. The pull kept working under his ribs. Another thread rose. He followed it back with his eyes, from Diablo's wrapped hand to his own, and he understood what bound them. It was not blood. It was not a sword strike a thousand years old. It was the belief that the missing piece belonged in the other man's palm. Diablo pulled because Creusus half-agreed he was a piece. As long as he agreed, the rope had somewhere to catch. He stopped agreeing. He lowered the hand that hung in the air. He let his fist open. He said, "I am not your hand. I am mine." The pull did not stop, but it thinned, as if the rope had frayed at the far end. Creusus stepped back one pace. His heel moved when he told it to.

Creusus took another step back. The stone hall held its shape. Diablo sat on the seat with his wrapped hand still open, waiting for a piece that would not come. Behind Creusus, the knight stood near a pillar, silent, his black plate catching no light. Creusus looked at the knight and remembered the hum. In the arena, the armor had rung under his fingers, and matching that ring had given him his body back. The armor still carried it now. He could hear it under the quiet, low and even, like water moving under ice. Diablo did not have it. Diablo had only the pull, and the pull had thinned. Creusus crossed to the knight in four strides and set his wrapped fist against the breastplate. The hum climbed into his teeth. He held it, matched it in his throat, and let it fill his chest. Then he turned and drove his fist into Diablo's jaw. The ring passed out of him and into the seated man, and the stone hall answered. A crack ran up the nearest pillar. Diablo's head snapped sideways. His mouth opened, but no sound came. Creusus hit him again. The wrappings on Diablo's hand went loose. A third punch, and the skin at Diablo's temple split without blood, showing a dry seam beneath, like a pot fired wrong. Creusus kept the hum going. He hit the seam. Diablo came apart along it, shoulder to hip, in a slow tearing that made no noise the ear could name. What lifted out of the broken shape was not a body. It was a weight, a wanting, a shape that had used a face. Creusus opened his mouth and drew it in. He did not decide to. He only stopped refusing. It settled behind his ribs and lay down there, heavy and quiet, and he knew the will inside it was his now, not the other way. The pillar stopped cracking. The seat was empty. The knight had not moved. Creusus lowered his fist and looked at his own hand, still wrapped, still his. Something else was his too…

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.

Creusus walked out of the arena on his own feet. The marshals stepped aside. The crowd noise slid off him. Under his ribs the new weight shifted with every step, curious, awake, wanting a use. He felt it push at his thoughts and try to color them. It liked the sound of the crowd. It wanted to turn and look at the tiers and count who owed him something. He kept walking. He knew whose thought that was. It was not his. He took a room at a small stone bungalow past the arena walls, ivy on the trellis, one door, one window on each side. He paid the woman there and asked to be left alone. Inside, he sat on the floor with his back to the wall and looked at his black-wrapped hands. He closed his eyes and reached inward the way he had reached for the door in the wall. The weight met him. He sorted through it. He found the taste for a throne. He found a hunger to be bowed to. He found the wish to break a man for the pleasure of it. Each one had Diablo's shape on it. Creusus took hold of the first and pulled. It came out of him like a splinter working free. It fought. It told him he was cutting away his own strength. He kept pulling. He pulled out the hunger next, then the pleasure in cruelty, then the small quiet want to be feared. He set each one in the air in front of him and held them there with the same power that had opened the frame in the arena. He shaped that power around them into a thin skin, then thickened it, then closed it. A ball formed between his palms, no bigger than a fist, black as the frame had been, veined with pale cracks where the trapped will pressed against its cage. Creusus poured what he had left into the shell until the shell went hard and cold. His arms dropped. The ball rolled once on the boards and stopped. He sat where he was for a long time. His hands shook. His mouth was dry. The weight under his ribs was smaller now, and quieter, and his. He crawled to the narrow bed and pulled the blanket down and lay on the floor beside it because the floor was closer. He slept without dreams for the first time since the squire had vanished from the sand. When he woke the light through the window had moved across the room and back again. The black orb sat where it had stopped, watching nothing, holding what he had cut out. His knuckles were still wrapped in the black material. The tournament was still waiting. He got up.

Creusus stood in the bungalow at first light and unwrapped his hands. The black material peeled back like wet cloth, but a thin film clung to his skin beneath. He rubbed at it with his thumb. It did not come off. He dragged his knuckles across the stone wall until they bled, and the black seeped back through the cut and closed it. He sat down. The orb on the floor watched nothing. Inside himself he could feel the rest of the power humming low, small, patient. He had cut out the worst of it and sealed it in the shell. What was left was quieter, but it was not gone. He closed his eyes and reached for it the way he had reached before. This time he did not try to pull. He held it. He felt its shape and its weight and asked it what it wanted to be. It answered with heat under his skin and a slow pressure in his wrists. He thought of the post at the training grounds. He thought of the old man at the docks and the way the man's fingers moved over the net, tying knots without looking. Creusus opened his hands. He fed a thread of the power down into the black film on his knuckles and told it to lie flat. The film thickened, then thinned, then settled into the shape of wrappings. Clean lines. Even tension. He flexed his fingers. The power sank back and went still. He tried a slow punch at the air. Nothing sparked. Nothing hummed. It was only his fist, wrapped, ready. He understood then. He could not scrape the magic out. He could shape it. He could hold it in a small pocket under the skin and leave it there until he called for it. For the tournament he would call for none of it. He would fight the way he had always fought. The power would wait. He picked up the black orb and set it in the bottom of his pack, wrapped in a spare shirt. The cracks on its surface pressed faintly against his palm, and the thing inside pushed back and found the shell and gave up. He tied the pack shut. He was whole in the way a man is whole after he has cut off a bad finger and lived. The worst of Diablo was locked in the orb. The rest was his to spend or save. He rolled his shoulders, wrapped his knuckles once more out of habit over the black skin, and walked to the door. The next bout was on the card. He meant to finish what he had started.

Creusus had two days before the next bout. He walked past the arena gates without looking at them and followed a stone path up into the kingdom gardens. The pack on his back was light. The orb inside it was quiet. He passed low hedges and pastel beds of flowers he could not name, and he made his shoulders drop for the first time in a week. He had come here to do nothing. He was bad at doing nothing, so he kept walking until the paths narrowed and the noise of the town fell away behind him. The path opened into a small grove. Trees closed over a ring of old brick set into the ground. A weathered statue stood at the edge, a robed figure with one hand held across its chest. He read the plaque. Aegis of Mercy. He did not know the story. He sat on the brick and looked at the stone face and felt his knuckles itch under the wrappings. He rubbed them through the cloth. The black skin beneath stayed still. A woman stepped into the grove from the far path. She carried a small cluster of grapes in one hand. A thin gold band held back her dark hair, and her white dress caught the light between the leaves. She stopped when she saw him. She did not turn away. She looked at him the way a person looks at a horse in a field, curious and unafraid. He stood up too fast. The brick scraped under his boot. "You are the fighter," she said. "The one with no sword." "Creusus." His voice came out flat and low, the way it always came out. He tried to think of something else to add. He thought of the post at the training grounds and the sound his fist made on wood. He thought of the old man at the docks and his knotted fingers. He had nothing to say about grapes, or gardens, or the statue behind him. He said, "I was leaving." It was not true. He watched her face for the small pull of disappointment he expected. It did not come, but he had already decided what her silence meant. He nodded once and stepped past her onto the path. He did not look back. He heard her say his name once, softly, like a question. He kept walking. By the time he reached the main garden his hands were fists inside the wrappings and the power under his skin was warm and awake. He forced it down. He had come here to rest. He had failed at that. He would go back to the post instead. The post did not need words. Two days. He walked faster.

Creusus was halfway down the main path when he heard the footsteps behind him. Quick steps on stone, not the tread of a guard. He did not stop. The pastel beds blurred past on either side, pink and blue and pale yellow flowers in low tidy rows. He told himself the post was two gates and a road away. He told himself he did not need to turn. The steps caught up. "You walk fast for a man who was leaving nowhere," she said. She came around his shoulder and stopped in the path in front of him. The grapes were still in her hand. Up close he saw the gold band in her hair and the plain sandals on her feet. "Kallista," she said. "Since you did not ask." She held out the cluster. "I have more than I can eat. Sit with me while I finish them and I will call it fair trade." He looked at the grapes. He looked at her face. He thought of the post and the sound of wood. He thought of the warm thing under his knuckles that had woken up the last time she spoke to him. He opened his mouth to refuse. What came out was, "I do not have anything to trade back." She shrugged. "Company. I have been walking these paths alone since morning." He stood there a long moment. Then he sat down on the low stone edge of the nearest bed. She sat beside him, close enough that he could see the small chip in one of her bracelets. She pulled a grape free and held it out. He took it between two bandaged fingers and ate it. It was cold and sweet. She did not ask about his hands. She asked about the statue in the grove, and when he said he did not know the story, she told it to him in a few short sentences, plain, without flourish. He listened. He ate another grape. The warmth under his skin stayed low and quiet, like a dog that had lain down. They sat until the grapes were gone. She dropped the stem in the dirt beside the flowers and stood and brushed her dress. "Tomorrow," she said. "Same path. Bring something this time." She did not wait for an answer. She walked back the way she had come. Creusus stayed on the stone a while longer. His hands rested open on his knees. He counted the flower beds across from him because he had nothing else to count. Six. He would come back tomorrow. He knew it before he stood up. The post could wait one more day. He walked out of the gardens toward the town, and for the first time in a week his shoulders were down and stayed down.