Scarlett Emberheart set her entry form on the registration desk and waited for the big man behind it to tear it up. He had torn up two forms already that morning. She had watched him do it. Her name was written clean at the top of hers, in her own hand, and under sponsor she had left the line blank. She wore full plate. Her sword hung at her hip. Her father had made her earn the armor before he let her fight in it, and she meant to fight in it today. Brogan Ironquill read the form. He read it again. He looked at her helm, her lipstick, her red hair pulled back tight. "No sponsor. No entry. No exceptions." He pushed the form back across the wood. Scarlett did not move it. "The charter does not require a sponsor for a man," she said. "I read it." "Rule stands for women," Brogan said. "Find a knight. Get his seal. Come back before the horn." He set her form to the side of his stack, not in it, and reached for the next. Behind her, the line of fighters shifted and began to laugh. She walked out of the arena gates and down toward the training grounds because that was where old knights drank in the morning when they had nowhere else to be. She had tried this once before, last year, and gotten as far as the weapons check before they turned her out. She knew the names of the knights the crown favored. None of them would sign for her. She needed a knight the crown had forgotten. She found him under an awning behind the smithy, alone at a bench, eating bread. His mail was clean but old. A scar cut across his cheek. She had heard his name in her father's house, years back, spoken low. Aldric Thornhaven. A prince, once, until the man on the throne had made him nothing. She sat down across from him and laid the form flat on the bench. "I need a sponsor," she said. "They took your title. I'm asking you to sign anyway." Aldric looked at the form. He looked at her armor. He tore a piece off his bread and chewed it. "Why me." "Because the crown will hate it," she said. "And because no one else will." He set the bread down. He took the quill from her belt and pressed his seal into the wax she had brought. "Win," he said. "Every round. Win." She carried the form back to the desk before the horn. Brogan read the seal. His jaw worked once. He wrote her name into the book at number forty-three.

Scarlett left the registration desk with her number stitched to her sleeve and walked back toward the smithy to thank the man who had signed for her. Aldric Thornhaven was not at the bench. A boy pointed her past the awning, toward a shed behind the stables. She found Aldric inside, standing over a small table with a candle and a folded map. He looked up when her shadow crossed the door. "Shut it," he said. She shut the door. He did not offer her a seat. He rolled the map closed and set it aside. "You signed my form," she said. "I came to say thanks." "Thanks is nothing," Aldric said. "I need one more thing from you before you fight." He pulled a chain from under his shirt. A ring hung on it, gold, worn thin at the band. "This was my father's. King Cassian Thornhaven. Adim killed him." He set the ring on the table between them. "The story the crown tells is bandits on the north road. There were no bandits. Adim sent men in bandit cloaks. He paid them in silver from my father's own treasury. Two of them are dead now. One drinks in a village I know. I have his name in writing." Scarlett looked at the ring. She did not touch it. "Why tell me." "Because a sponsor's seal is not enough," Aldric said. "You fight tomorrow under my name. If you win, the crowd will ask whose knight you are. I need the answer already given." He put his hand flat on the table. "Swear to me. Not to the crown. To me, as the true heir. Say it plain, here, before you take the field." Scarlett thought of her father, who had taught her the armor was a debt she owed the man who gave it. She thought of Brogan Ironquill's jaw working when he saw the seal. If she swore, the crown would mark her. If she did not swear, Aldric would pull his name off her form and the marshals would strike her from the book by dusk. She knelt on the shed floor in her plate. She put her hand on the ring. "I swear to you, Aldric Thornhaven, as the true heir of your father. My sword answers to your name." Aldric did not smile. He lifted the ring and put it back under his shirt. "Good," he said. "Now win." She stood and walked out into the yard. Two of the king's men stood at the smithy corner, watching the shed door. They had not been there when she went in. One of them wrote something on a slip of paper and tucked it into his belt. Scarlett kept walking. Her name was in a book now, and in a second book she could not see.

Scarlett walked from the shed to the arena gate with her sleeve number bright against her plate. The king's men followed at a distance and did not hide it. At the marshals' table under the arch of the arena, a clerk in gray took her form and ran a finger down the seals. He stopped at the wax at the bottom. He looked at it, then at her, then at it again. He called the marshal over without a word. The marshal was a heavy man with ink on his knuckles. He bent close to the wax and turned the paper toward the torch. "This is the royal house," he said. "But this is not the king's mark." He set the form flat on the table and put his thumb beside the seal. "Whose seal is on your paper, girl?" Scarlett kept her hands at her sides. "Aldric Thornhaven signed for me," she said. "He is a prince of the royal house. The charter asks for a sponsor of standing. It does not name the king." The marshal read the charter line the clerk pointed to. He read it twice. Behind him the stone tiers of the arena filled with people who had paid to see the first bouts. A horn sounded inside the ring. The marshal wet his thumb and pressed it beside the wax to test the impression. It held. He straightened. "The seal is good," he said. "The charter does not bar it." He wrote a short note in the book beside her number and turned the page. Then he lowered his voice so only she and the clerk could hear. "You understand what you have done. You have put a prince's mark on a woman's form on the day the king watches from that box. If he asks me whose knight you are, I will read him what is written." "Read it plain," Scarlett said. He nodded once and waved her through the gate. One of the king's men at the wall turned and walked fast back toward the castle road. Scarlett stepped onto the sand of the arena with her name in the book, her sponsor named aloud, and a rider already carrying the news to the king.

Scarlett had walked back from the arena gate to a rented room above a shop in the market town, boots heavy, sword still on her hip. She unbuckled the top strap of her breastplate and sat on the edge of the cot. Before she could lie down, a fist hit the door three times. She opened it with the sword in her left hand. Two guards stood on the landing in crown livery. Between them stood Sir Konic in black plate trimmed with gold, a red cape at his shoulders. He did not ask to come in. He walked past her, and the guards followed. Konic set a folded paper on the small table. It bore the broken wax of Aldric's seal. "You fight under an exiled prince," he said. "Tell me where he is." Scarlett stayed by the open door. "The charter takes his seal," she said. "The marshal read it and passed me through. Where he sleeps is not on the form." Konic's jaw tightened. He picked up the paper, turned it, set it down again. "He is a traitor to the crown. You carry his mark. That makes you one too." "Then strike my name from the book," she said. "You cannot. You know you cannot." He looked at her for a long moment. He knew the charter as well as she did. He had read it before he came. "No," he said at last. "I cannot. You will be allowed to compete." He smiled then, small and thin, and stepped in close as if to shake her hand. The punch came under the smile. His gauntlet drove into her chest below the loosened strap. The wind went out of her. She hit the floor on one knee, sword clattering flat. The guards did not move. Konic crouched so his face was near hers. "You are a traitor tonight," he said quietly. "The only reason my men do not open your throat on this floor is the prince. Give me his room and you walk into the arena tomorrow with a clean name. Keep him hidden and you walk in marked." She could not speak yet. She shook her head once. Konic stood. He picked up the folded paper with Aldric's seal and slid it inside his cloak. "Then you keep him alive with your silence," he said, "and you keep yourself alive the same way. Until one runs out." He walked to the door. The guards followed. He paused on the landing. "Sleep if you can, knight. You fight in the morning." The door shut. Scarlett stayed on the floor, one hand flat on the boards, the other pressed to her chest, and listened to their boots go down the stairs into the market town below.

Scarlett slept in her armor. At dawn she walked from the rented room to the arena with her sword on her hip and Konic's bruise dark under the plate. The marshals waved her through the competitor gate. She waited in the shaded tunnel while the stands filled above her, boots and voices rolling down the stone. The first bout was called late. A page ran up with a slate and told her the ledger had been corrected. Her opening opponent was not the knight listed the night before. She would fight Sir Konic first. She knew the ledger had not been wrong. She knew who had written the new name on it. She said nothing. She stepped through the arch onto the field. Konic waited at the center in black plate trimmed with gold, red cape short at his shoulders. He nodded to her as if they were strangers. The marshal walked them to the weapon rack and read the rule aloud. Each fighter would choose one weapon and one only. Konic took a long axe with a spike at its head. Scarlett took a straight arming sword, a hand's width shorter than her own, but balanced. The horn sounded. He came at her fast. She turned the first cut on the flat and stepped off the line. She cut at his thigh and struck plate. He swung the axe head low and she jumped it. They circled. He was heavier and taller and did not tire. She landed nothing. He landed nothing. Every time she pressed, he set the axe haft between them and pushed her back a pace. Every time he swung, she was already moving. Her breath came louder inside the helm. Sweat ran into her eyes. Konic smiled through the visor slit. He smiled when she blocked. He smiled when she slipped. He smiled when she stepped wide to buy air. He was not fighting to end her in the first round. He was fighting to wear her down. Her arms grew heavy before his did. She felt it in her shoulders and knew he felt it too. She missed a parry and the axe haft cracked against her ribs where his gauntlet had struck the night before. She staggered, kept her feet, and drove the point at his gorget. He turned it away without effort. The horn sounded for the round break before she could set her stance again. She walked to her corner on stiff legs. Konic walked to his at the same pace he had started at. He rested the axe on his shoulder and looked at her across the sand, still smiling. Scarlett sat on the bench, pulled off her helm, and pressed her palm flat to her ribs. The bruise had opened wider under the plate. She had three minutes.

Scarlett drank water and watched Konic across the sand. He had not sat down. He rolled his shoulders once and set the axe butt against his boot. She had three minutes and she knew the truth of it. Another round the same way and she would fall. Her ribs burned under the plate. Her arms hung heavy. She could not out-last him. She could not out-reach him. The axe head was long and the haft was longer and every pace she gave him was a pace he used. She looked at the weapon rack by the marshal's post. A short blade rested on the third peg, half the length of the sword in her hand. She stood up before she had finished thinking. She walked to the marshal and asked to change her weapon at the break. The marshal frowned and checked the charter roll. The rule named one weapon per bout, not per round. He nodded and stepped aside. Scarlett set the arming sword on the rack and took the short blade. It sat light in her palm, no longer than her forearm. The crowd noticed. A murmur ran through the tiers of the arena and the banners on the wall shifted in the wind. Konic saw the blade and laughed once inside his helm. He lifted the axe and came forward as the horn blew. Scarlett did not wait. She ran at him. He swung high, expecting her to duck and circle wide. She did not. She stepped inside the arc of the swing before it finished, close enough to smell the oil on his gorget. The haft passed behind her shoulder. She drove the pommel of the short blade up under the edge of his helm, into the soft place between jaw and neck. His head snapped back. His knees folded. The axe hit the sand a beat before he did. The marshal raised his baton and named her the victor. Konic's second was already at his side. Then a man in a red sash pushed from the stands and shouted a challenge. He called the weapon change a breach and demanded a rematch. The marshal listened, then lifted his baton again and declared the bout would be run a second time. The crowd rose as one and booed. They booed the marshal and the man in the red sash and the whole box behind him. The booing did not stop. It grew until the marshal bent his head to his clerk and read the charter line once more. He straightened. He struck the baton against the post and reversed his ruling. The first result would stand. Scarlett walked from the field with the short blade still in her hand. Her ribs still burned. But the bracket had moved, and she had moved with it.

Scarlett left the sand with the short blade still in her fist and her ribs screaming under the plate. The marshal called five days rest before the next bracket. Talon Brightshield met her at the tunnel and did not speak. He took her arm and walked her past the crowd to the hospital, up the wide stone steps, and into a bed by the arched window. He set his palm on her side. She felt the heat move through the plate and into her bones. Talon breathed out hard. His own face went gray. He sat down on the stool beside the bed and did not stand up again for an hour. Aldric came in the second morning wearing a plain cloak with the hood up. He kept to the far wall and watched. He did not speak to her. He nodded once to Talon and then studied the room the way a man studies ground before a fight. Scarlett understood. A prince at her bedside would draw knives. A stranger in a corner would not. She let him watch. She trusted the watching. Talon worked on her every day. He set the broken rib on the first pass. He felt it knit under his hand and he felt his own chest ache in the same place, the way his god asked him to pay. But the pain did not leave her. She woke each morning worse than she had gone to sleep. Her skin held a sick heat. Her mouth tasted of iron. Talon asked himself out loud what he was missing. He asked the ceiling. He asked his god. He got no answer. A nurse in a clean apron came and went with broths and cloths and a small brown bottle she poured into the water pitcher. She dabbed Scarlett's brow. She smoothed the blanket. She stayed longer than the other nurses. By the fourth day Talon set his hand on Scarlett's side and felt the rib whole and the flesh warm and wrong. He looked at Aldric across the room. "The bone is set," he said. "She is worse." Aldric did not move from the wall. "Then it is not the bone," he said. Talon shook his head. "I cannot find it. I do not know what I am fighting." He said the words plainly because there was no softer way. He feared a hurt magic could not reach. He said that too. The blonde nurse gathered her tray at the end of the shift. She tucked the small brown bottle into the pocket of her apron. She smoothed Scarlett's blanket one last time and turned toward the door. At the threshold she glanced back at the bed, at the paladin bent over his patient, at the hooded man against the wall. Her mouth moved into a small, private smile. Then she walked out into the corridor and was gone.

Talon set both hands on Scarlett's side as the fourth day thinned toward evening. He had run out of small measures. He pulled the last of his magic up out of his chest and pushed it into her the way a man empties a bucket. The heat left him in one long pour. His arms shook. His mouth tasted of copper. Scarlett's breathing changed under his palms. It slowed. It steadied. The sick heat in her skin dropped a notch, then another. He felt her turn a corner. He also felt the floor tilt. He sat down hard on the stool and did not get back up. His head hung. His hands stayed open on his knees, empty. A bell rang in the corridor before he could speak. Boots came down the hall. A senior nurse stopped in the doorway with a folded order in her hand. She said every nurse assigned to the woman in this bed was pulled off the ward until further notice. She said the girl might be reacting to something in the medicine, and no one was to touch her water, her cloths, or her food. Two aides came in behind her and gathered pitchers and basins and rags into a covered basket. They took the small brown bottle off the side table. They took the pitcher on the sill. They did not look at Talon. They did not look at the hooded man against the wall. They carried the basket out and shut the door behind them. At the end of the corridor the blonde nurse in the clean apron heard the order passed from one aide to another. She did not slow. She did not turn her head. She stepped into a side hall and untied the apron as she walked. She folded it small and pushed it into a laundry bin. Amelia D'agrane walked out through the kitchen door of the great stone hospital and into the alley. She had not counted on the paladin spending himself down to nothing in one push. It did not matter. The girl in the bed would not fight at full strength again. That was enough. A cart passed. She stepped in behind it. By the time it reached the corner she was only a plain face in the street, freckles and nothing else, and no one who saw her would remember her later. Inside the room Talon lifted his head. His voice came out thin. He told Aldric the fever had broken. He told him he could not do that a second time. Scarlett slept without twisting in the sheet for the first time in four days. Her color was still wrong, but it was hers. Talon looked at his own hands and knew he had bought her the bracket and no more. She would wake. She would stand. She would walk back to the sand on legs that were not what they had been. It would have to be enough.

Scarlett woke the next morning with her legs under her again, though the strength in them was not what it had been. Talon slept in the chair by the door, gray around the mouth. Aldric was gone from the wall. A marshal's runner came at first light with the bracket sheet. She was to fight before noon. She dressed in her plate slowly, buckle by buckle, and walked to the arena on her own feet. She would not be carried in. They brought her opponent out to the sand and named him. Cedric Falterblade. He was young and thin under the plate, brown hair stuck up in points, and he held his sword like a man holding a snake. In his first bout he had split another knight's leg clean through the thigh. The man's shin and foot had not fallen with the rest of him. They had simply not been there anymore. Scarlett had watched it from the hospital window and felt cold under the sheet. Now he stood ten paces off and would not meet her eyes. He said, quietly, that he was sorry she had drawn him. Then he said he did not mean that the way it sounded. The horn went. Scarlett moved before fear could hold her feet. She stepped inside his guard on the second beat and drove her shoulder into his chest. He was lighter than she expected. He went down on his back in the sand. His helm rang. He tried to push up on the flat of his sword like a crutch, blade set point-down in the dirt. His elbow gave. He fell again. The marshal's arm came up and the horn sounded and her name was called. She stood over him and breathed. She had won a bout in under six seconds. She almost laughed. The sword shivered where its point sat buried in the sand. The air above the pommel split. A thin bright seam opened, no wider than a finger, and grew. Cold poured out of it. Cedric saw it and rolled away on his shoulder, shouting something she did not catch. The seam widened toward her, not him. Scarlett tried to step back. Her tired legs answered a half-beat slow. The crack reached her boot. It took the boot. It took her leg to the knee without sound or pain, only absence. She looked down once at where her shin should have been and saw stars. Then the rift swallowed the rest of her. The sand where she had stood was empty. The marshal's raised arm was still raised. Cedric sat on the ground and stared at his sword and did not move.

Outside the arena, the crowd did not know what to do with their hands. The marshal's arm still pointed at the sky. He called Scarlett's name a second time and got no answer, only sand where a woman had been. Someone in the front row shouted that she had won and someone else shouted that she was dead. Both were written down. Guards took Cedric Falterblade by the elbows and lifted him off the ground. He did not fight them. He said, quietly, that he had not meant to. Then he said he had meant not to, which was different, and he stopped talking after that. They led him out under the arch while the marshals argued over the ledger. The name at the top of the bracket still read Emberheart. No one crossed it out. Scarlett woke on her back on a floor that was not sand. She sat up slowly. Her leg was there. Both legs were there. She was in a wide flat place with no walls she could see, and the light came from nowhere in particular. Around her lay junk. Broken chairs. A cartwheel with no cart. A stack of clay bowls. A door with no frame, standing up on its own. And chickens. Six of them, then eight, then more behind a heap of rope. They did not look at her. They pecked at the floor as if the floor had seeds. It did not. She stood up. Her sword was still on her hip. That, at least, was something. She looked up. The rift hung in the sky like a crack in a bowl held over her head, thin and bright and very far. She could see the arena through it, small as a coin. She saw the marshal's arm. She saw Cedric being walked away. She shouted. Her voice went nowhere. She climbed a pile of crates and reached up with her sword and the tip did not come close. She threw a bowl. The bowl went up and came down. She threw a boot. Same. She braced her feet and jumped, and her tired legs gave under her, and she landed hard on her knees among the chickens, who did not move. She stood again. She tried again. Nothing worked. Nothing was going to work. Then the crack in the sky sealed. It did not close slowly. It was there, and then it was a line, and then it was nothing. The arena went with it. The light stayed the same. Scarlett stood in the middle of the junk with her sword out and no way home. A chicken walked across her boot. She lowered the sword. She was the tournament champion. She was somewhere that did not know it, and no one out there could reach her, and she could not reach them. She would have to find her own door.

Scarlett walked for a long time. The junk went on in every direction. She passed a wagon tongue standing up in the floor like a spear, and a pile of shoes with no pairs, and more chickens that did not look at her. Her legs shook. The poison in her blood had not left her. She stopped to rest against a stack of barrels and heard it then, from somewhere behind the heap of rope she had left an hour ago. A knock. Then another. Something rapping the floor and waiting, rapping and waiting, the way a blind man taps a stick. She drew her sword. The knocking moved. It came around the far side of a broken cart and she saw what made it. A hand. Only a hand. As wide as a table and shaped like a man's, with knuckles and veins and a clean thumbnail. It moved on its fingers like a spider walks. It struck the floor with one fingertip, held still, then struck again, listening for her through the ground. She ran. Her ribs burned. She cut left around a door standing on nothing and right around a heap of clay bowls, and behind her the knocking sped up and came on. She could not fight it. In her state a straight fight would end her in one grip. She ducked behind a wagon and held her breath. The tapping stopped. Then it started again, closer, patient, tracking the drum of her heart through her boots. It caught her at a low wall of crates. She turned with the sword raised in both hands, ready to bring it down on the wrist. The hand stopped. It did not lunge. It sank to the floor and lay flat, fingers spread, palm down. She waited. It waited. She stepped back. It walked forward, the same distance, and settled again. She stepped sideways. It matched her and settled again. It was not hunting now. It was following. She lowered the sword an inch. The hand lifted one finger and pointed straight up at the empty sky where the rift had been. Then it turned over. The palm opened toward her, flat and still, waiting to be stepped on. Scarlett stared at the lines cut across it. Her mouth went dry. Her hands would not stop shaking. She did not know what waited above, or who had sent the hand, or what climbing onto it would cost. She only knew it was the first door she had been offered, and she was more afraid than she had ever been in the arena.

Scarlett stood over the open palm and tried to think. Fighting the hand would kill her. Walking away would kill her slower. She sheathed her sword. She stepped onto the palm and sat down in the middle of it, knees drawn up, half sure the fingers would close and crush her ribs against her heart. The fingers did not close. The palm was warm. It felt like sitting on a cloud that had been left in the sun. A soft light rose out of the skin under her and washed up over her arms and face. She squinted against it. Her hands stopped shaking. The ache in her ribs dulled. The sick weight the poison had left in her legs began to lift, thread by thread, the way a fever breaks. She told herself this was a bad dream. She had fallen in the junk and hit her head and none of it was real. But the strength kept coming back into her. She could feel her fingers again. She could feel her breath go all the way down. Around her the junkyard drew in. A pile of shoes near her foot blinked out. The wagon tongue was gone. The chickens were gone. The broken cart, the barrels, the door standing on nothing, all of it vanished in patches, as if someone were erasing the room she sat in. The hand did not move. It cupped her and held the light on her and asked nothing. She wanted to ask who sent it, and what it wanted, and where the palm meant to take her when the last of the junk was gone. She opened her mouth and closed it. There was no one to answer. The light grew brighter. The palm rose under her, slow and steady, and the barren floor fell away beneath the knuckles. Scarlett gripped the thumb with one gloved hand and let the hand carry her up.

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.

The hand hung above Cedric like a threat no one wanted to test. Guards pressed against the far wall of the arena. The head marshal stood on the sand with his staff, halfway between running and speaking. Scarlett walked toward Cedric. Her helm was still on. Her sword was still at her belt. She felt every eye in the tiers follow her. When she stopped ten paces from Cedric, the hand above him drew in on itself. The fingers folded. The palm shrank. It kept shrinking until it was the size of any hand a man might have, and then it drifted down and landed on Cedric's shoulder like a tame bird. Cedric flinched, then didn't. A ripple went through the stands. "Don't be scared of him," Cedric said, loud enough to reach the marshal. He said it again, quieter, to Scarlett. "Please. Don't be scared. He wouldn't hurt anyone. He's mine. I mean, he's my family's. I lost him a long time ago." He looked at the small hand on his shoulder and his eyes went wet again. The marshal crossed the sand slowly. Two other marshals joined him at the center. They spoke in a knot, heads low. The crowd waited. Scarlett waited. The small hand tapped once against Cedric's collarbone, patient. The head marshal turned and raised his staff. His voice carried. "The bout between competitor forty-three and competitor forty-two was never called. It is called now. The win stands with Emberheart. She advances." He paused, and his jaw worked. "Falterblade is disqualified. From this tourney and every tourney under the charter. Effective now." He looked at his guards. The guards looked at the small hand on Cedric's shoulder and did not move from the wall. No one stepped forward to take Cedric. The marshal did not ask them to. He struck his staff on the sand once and walked away. Scarlett breathed out inside her helm. She had her match. She had her place in the bracket. She had not lost the ring she had already won. Cedric sat down in the sand where he stood. The small hand climbed into his lap and settled there. "His name is Danor," Cedric said. Scarlett knelt across from him. She pulled off her helm. Her silver hair fell around her face. "Family familiar," Cedric went on. "Been with us four generations. I lost him when I was nine. I don't know how he got where he got. I don't know why he was in there." He touched the small hand with one finger. Danor curled around it. "I'm sorry about the sword," Cedric said. "I'm sorry about all of it. I didn't know it did that until I did it to a stump." Scarlett looked up at the tear in the sky. It had not closed. She looked back at Cedric. "Then we have a problem," she said. "Because that's still open."