New letters appeared under the others, and the whole arena read them.
[Class Ladder: Maverick Silkborn, rank 214. Dorian Ashgrove, rank 215.]
[20,000 Essence has been taken from the Heartstone of Dorian Ashgrove.]
[20,000 Essence has been added to the Heartstone of Maverick Silkborn.]
Dorian made a small sound, as if someone had hit him in the stomach. A moment later, the Essence reached Mav, and he understood why. It felt like a warm river pouring into his chest. Far away, at the bottom of his sea, his Heartstone began to beat so hard that he could feel it in his teeth.
The angler’s lure had brought him 720 Essence, and he had been proud of it. This was almost 30 times more.
’A wager isn’t a sale. So House Goldmantle doesn’t take a fifth of it.’
It was a small, stupid thing to think about at such a moment, and it almost made him laugh.
He lowered his harpoon. Dorian stayed on his knees in the mud. He wasn’t looking at Mav anymore. He was looking up at the box with the ash-colored banner, so Mav looked too.
Aldric Ashgrove had stood up. He brushed something off the sleeve of his plain gray coat. Then he turned around and walked out of his box. He didn’t look at the sand, and he didn’t look at his son.
Dorian’s face fell apart in front of 50,000 people.
Mav had hated that face for eight years. Now he felt almost nothing. He was only tired.
He thought of what Dorian had whispered about Wren, and of Pell, who had been sent to do Dorian’s dirty work and had died for it. None of that was paid for yet.
But Dorian Ashgrove would never be his liege, and he would never come near Juno. That would do for today.
-----
He went to his Subjects before he did anything else.
Sela was sitting against the inside of the wall, with her head on her knees. She had held that rope of water for almost a minute, and it had taken everything she had. When Mav put his hand through the wall, she lifted her head, and a tired, proud feeling came from her.
’You won this duel, Sela. Thank you. I’ll never forget it.’
He thanked the others one by one, and he used their names. He thanked Six, who had covered him with his own body and who still couldn’t see. He thanked Moss, Fern and Reed. He thanked Seven and Two, and he thanked Twelve, who swam in a proud little circle. He thanked Eighteen and his line of spined fish.
Then he let go of his Manifestation, and he sent them all home.
A man in a white and gold coat was already running across the sand, with three glass eyes around him. It was the same man who had questioned him after the first round.
"Maverick Silkborn! You brought a builder into the Great Arena, and she won you the duel. Since when do builders fight?"
"Since today," Mav said.
He walked around the man. Then Wildroot reached him.
Hundreds of people in green scarves had come down onto the sand. Ronald got there first, and he lifted Mav off the ground with both arms.
"You did it! You turned your back on him! I thought that you had gone mad, and then the water came out, and I..."
"Ronald," Mav said through his teeth. "My burns."
Ronald put him down very quickly. Tamsin was beside him, with tears running down her face and her slate held against her chest. She was Mav’s vassal, so if he had lost, she would have belonged to Dorian by tonight. She didn’t say anything. She only nodded at him, again and again.
Quill pushed through the crowd. She looked at his burned arm, and then at the place where his dome had been.
"Whose idea was the builder?" she asked.
"It was mine."
She didn’t praise him, but the corner of her mouth moved.
"Go to the healing room, Silkborn. That’s an order."
-----
On Earth, in a kitchen above a shoe repair shop, Juno Lowe was screaming.
She had been screaming for a full minute. She stood on her chair with her fists in the air, while the screen in the corner showed a boy in a burned shirt being carried across the sand. Her mother was crying into her apron and laughing at the same time.
Garrett Lowe sat at the table with his bandaged hands flat on the wood. He hadn’t moved since the hounds had first turned to ash.
"He promised me that he would stay last," he said at last.
"He lied to you," Mira said, and she wiped her eyes.
Garrett was quiet for a moment. Then he nodded slowly.
"Good," he said, and his voice was rough.
Somebody knocked at the door. It was the old man who drove the coal wagon, and half of the street was standing on the stairs behind him.
-----
In a training yard on the other side of the Nexus, a tall boy with long red hair watched the duel once, on a plate of glass that his trainer held for him.
Cassian Pyrecrest didn’t laugh at it, and he didn’t frown. He watched it the way he watched everything, as a problem to solve.
"They say that he’s a beast tamer, my lord," the trainer said. "And his potential is E."
"His builder lifted water," Cassian said. "Builders don’t fight, but he made one fight."
He thought about it for a moment. Then he gave the glass back.
"It doesn’t matter. His World stops at rank E."
He went back to his drakes, and he didn’t think about the boy again that day. But he had watched the whole duel to the end, and his trainer had never seen him do that for anyone who wasn’t ranked in the first 10.
-----
Thalia Sunspire had watched from her family’s box.
Her friends were waiting for her to say something. She always did, and it was always funny.
"Well?" Perrin said. "Aren’t you going to tell us about the seaweed boy?"
Thalia looked down at the sand, where the crowd in green scarves was carrying the boy out.
"Lord Ashgrove asked my mother to put this duel in every home on Earth," she said slowly. "He wanted as many people as possible to watch a traitor’s son kneel. A few hundred thousand of them did watch, and we’ve just shown them the opposite."
Nobody knew what to answer. Thalia found that she wasn’t sorry about it at all, and that surprised her.
She didn’t laugh, and after a moment, neither did they.
-----
On the top floor of the Tidecaller house, a young man in a sea-green coat turned away from his screen. He was smiling, as he almost always was.
"That dome was nothing but water," Marek Tidecaller said. "And there was no land in it at all."
"No, my lord," his steward said. "His World is called Submerged. People say that it’s only ocean."
"Only ocean." Marek repeated the words as if they tasted good. "Everything that lives in water belongs to my house. It has been that way for 400 years. So tell me something."
He was still smiling.
"Who is that boy, and why did nobody tell me about him?"