They were afraid of fire. Every wolf was.
Mav watched them press back against the trees, with their tails low and their lips pulled back from their teeth. The salamanders came toward them slowly, in no hurry, leaving lines of smoke on the sand behind them. Senna Rook stood in the middle of her black rock with her arms folded. She was a thin, dark girl, and she was smiling.
[Begin.]
The first salamander reached the edge of the pines. It touched a root, and the root caught fire.
The wolves scattered.
Brann didn’t call them back. Instead, he did something that Mav didn’t expect. He walked forward himself, out of his forest, past his wolves, until he was standing on the sand between the trees and the salamanders. He had nothing in his hands. He stood there and waited.
The wolves stopped running. One by one, they turned around and looked at him.
Then the biggest of them, a gray male with a torn ear, came out of the trees and stood beside him. The others followed. They came out slowly, still afraid, but they came, because Brann was standing there. They wouldn’t leave him alone.
“Go on,” Brann said quietly. “Snow.”
The wolves ran past him, not at the salamanders, but around them. They ran in a wide circle, kicking up the snow from between the roots of the pines. They threw it over the sand in clouds as they ran. Snow fell on the salamanders, on their glowing backs, on the hot sand around them.
It hissed. The orange light on their backs flickered.
It was close, much too close, and Mav watched it with his heart in his throat. Two of Brann’s wolves were burned so badly that the Arbiter took them from the sand. Brann himself had a burn across one arm that Mav could see from the bench. In the end, though, the salamanders were sitting in a ring of wet, steaming sand, too cold to burn anything, and 14 gray wolves were standing over them with their teeth bared.
[Senna Rook yields. Brann Holloway wins.]
Two to one.
The Wildroot bedsheet was going up and down like a flag in a storm. The Emberhall rows were silent. Brann came back to the bench holding his burned arm. His face was gray. But when Quill put a hand on his shoulder, he smiled.
“I was terrified,” he said to Mav. “I want you to know that.”
“So were they,” Mav said. “That’s why they followed you.”
—–
[Fourth duel. Maverick Silkborn, Wildroot, against Edric Vane, Emberhall.]
Mav walked onto the sand.
He felt the arena around him like a great weight, 50,000 people, with the glass eyes turning above him and the red rows silent. He didn’t mind it. He had walked onto this sand before, as the boy with a potential of E whom everyone had come to see lose. Now they had come to see something else, and he didn’t know what it was. He didn’t care.
Vane was already in place across the sand. He nodded politely.
Mav cast his Manifestation. His dome of water rose behind him, 50 meters across, and the crowd made a sound when they saw it. Two’s needlefish hung inside it in a silver cloud. Six came out onto the sand beside him.
He kept everything else at home, even Seven and the spined fish. Against a wall of bone, he didn’t need an army. He needed a way through it, and Quill had told him not to show more than that.
Vane cast his. The sand on his side turned into a flat field of red stones and dry bushes, as it had before. Thirty plate lizards walked out of it, gray and heavy, with thick plates of bone on their backs. They didn’t come forward. They formed three rows of 10, side by side, in front of Vane.
Then they locked.
Mav heard it, a sound like 30 doors slamming at once. The lizards’ plates closed and fit together. In a heartbeat, they were no longer 30 beasts. They were a wall of bone, three rows deep, between him and Vane.
[Begin.]
Nothing happened.
Vane stood behind his wall with his hands behind his back. He didn’t attack. He didn’t need to. He had seen everything that Mav had done in the first round, and everything that he had done against Dorian. Mav’s fish had to reach their enemy, and so did his crab. Mav’s lightning reached much farther than it had in the first round, because every borrowed skill grew with him. But Discharge went into whatever was closest, and the closest thing to Mav would always be 30 locked plates of bone.
Vane was standing behind all of them.
‘He’s going to wait,’ Mav thought. ‘He’s going to stand there until I do something stupid.’
So he did something that he had never done in an arena.
—–
[You have borrowed a skill: Dart.]
[You have borrowed a skill: Mire.]
[You have borrowed a skill: Frost Breath.]
Three skills at once. He felt them settle into him, one after another. His body felt very full and very light.
Dart took him across the sand in a heartbeat. He landed right in front of the wall of lizards, close enough to touch their plates. The crowd gasped. Vane’s face didn’t change, but his hands came out from behind his back.
Mav let Mire go.
The red stones under the first row of lizards turned to mud. It was deep, black mud that went down for meters. The lizards were locked. They couldn’t move their legs. They couldn’t let go of each other without opening their plates. So they did the only thing that a locked lizard could do. They sank.
The first row went down into the mud like stones into a pond. Their plates were still locked together, so they dragged the second row after them, and the second row dragged the third.
Vane shouted something. The lizards began to unlock, to save themselves.
It was too late. Mav breathed out.
The cold went over five meters of mud in front of him, and it froze. It froze around the lizards’ legs, around their bellies and around their half-open plates. Thirty lizards were held in black ice up to their backs, and none of them could move at all.
Twenty seconds had passed since his Dart.
Mav walked across the ice. Behind him, the needlefish came out of the dome in their thin sleeves and spread out over the frozen lizards, waiting. Six came behind them, clicking his claws. Mav stopped three steps from Edric Vane.
Vane looked at his frozen wall. Then he looked at Mav.
“I didn’t see that one,” he said quietly. “In any of the recordings.”
“No.”
“How many more have you got?”
Mav didn’t answer.
Vane was quiet for a moment. He wasn’t afraid, and Mav respected him for that. He was thinking, the way that a soldier thinks on a field that has just gone wrong. Then he raised his hand.
“I yield,” he said.
Mav let out a long, satisfied breath that nobody else could hear.
[Edric Vane yields. Maverick Silkborn wins. Wildroot wins the match, three duels to one.]
—–
The noise hit him like a wave.
It came from everywhere at once, from the upper rows, the lower rows, the aisles and the stairs. Mav had never heard anything like it. On the west side, the Wildroot bedsheet had been torn in two, and both halves were being waved in the air.
Mav let go of his dome. The ice under the lizards cracked as his cold left it. Vane’s lizards began to dig themselves out of the mud, slowly. Three of them didn’t move. They had been at the bottom of the first row, and the mud had closed over their heads.
Mav felt their Essence go into his needlefish, small and steady. He wanted to look away, but he didn’t.
He walked back to the Wildroot bench. Ronald grabbed him and lifted him off the ground. Tamsin was crying. Brann was laughing with his burned arm held against his chest. Nell sat at the end of the bench with her hands in her lap. When Mav looked at her, she gave him her small nod. Her eyes were shining. Mav was so proud of the four of them that it hurt.
Quill didn’t smile. But she put her hand flat on Mav’s shoulder, and she left it there while the noise went on and on.
Across the arena, Cassian Pyrecrest was still sitting at the end of the Emberhall bench. He had put down whatever he had been reading.
Cassian had never had to stand up. But he was looking at Mav.