Eris left last, but she was the first to return, bleeding from one ear but otherwise unhurt. Jaya flew to her, and this time there was no one to stop their embrace. We’d been left alone. Ocka came back next. For a long time after that, no one. Finally Gully was carried in by a gray man—not Pursey—and laid on the floor. He was unconscious, barely breathing. One side of his head looked caved in above the temple.
“I want him next,” Bult said.
“I hope I get you next,” Ammit growled. “Shut up.”
More time passed. Gully stirred but didn’t wake. I went to the piss-trough. I needed to go but couldn’t. I sat back down, hands clasped between my knees, as I always did at baseball and football games before the National Anthem was played. I didn’t look up at Cla but I could feel him looking at me, as if his stare had weight.
The door opened. Two night soldiers flanked it. Aaron and the Lord High passed between them. “Last match of the day,” Aaron said. “Cla and Charlie. Come on, kiddies, hump it.”
Cla got up at once and walked past me, turning his head to give me one final grin as he did. I followed. Iota was looking at me. He raised one hand and gave me an odd salute, not to his forehead but at the side of his face.
I know his weakness.
As I passed the Lord High, Kellin said, “I’ll be glad to be rid of you, Charlie. If I hadn’t needed thirty-two, I would have done it already.”
Two night soldiers ahead of us, Cla ahead of me, walking with his head slightly lowered and his hands swinging at his sides, already made into loose fists. Behind us walked the Lord High and Aaron, his lieutenant. My heart was beating slow and hard in my chest.
He did me down that once but I learned from it.
Up the corridor we walked, toward the brilliant rows of gaslight rimming the stadium. We passed the other team rooms. We passed the Equipment Room.
The blow, Iota goes down, the bucket rolls, Iota crawls for his pallet, Cla turns to look for the bucket.
We passed the Officials’ Room, from which there was a way out, at least according to Pursey’s note.
I throw the drumstick. It hits a bucket. Cla turns to look.
I started to get it then, and sped up a little as we came out of the corridor onto the dirt track surrounding the playing field. I didn’t draw even with Cla, but almost. He didn’t look at me. His attention was on the center of the field, where the weapons were placed in a line. The rings and ropes were gone. Two leather gloves with stabbing spikes on the knuckles were on the table where there had been drinks during our practices. There were the fighting sticks in their wicker basket, and two short stabbing spears in another.
Iota hadn’t answered my question when I asked, but maybe when I was leaving, he did. Maybe that odd salute he gave me wasn’t a salute. Maybe it was a message.
There was some applause as we followed the night soldiers toward the VIP box, but I barely heard it. Nor did I pay attention at first to the spectators flanking the box, or even to Elden Flight Killer. I was paying attention to Cla, who had turned to follow the rolling bucket on the floor of the cell he shared with Iota, and the drumstick I’d hucked at him in the team room. Cla who didn’t seem to realize I had pulled almost even with him, and why?
I know his weakness, Iota had said, and now I thought I did, too. Eye hadn’t given me a salute; he’d mimicked the sort of blinker a horse might wear.
Cla had either little peripheral vision or none at all.
6
We were led—no, herded—to the part of the track in front of the royal viewing box. I stood beside Cla, who didn’t just shift his eyes to look at me but turned his whole head. Immediately Kellin whapped him across the back of the neck with his limber stick, drawing a thin line of blood.
“Never mind looking at the make-believe prince, you great idiot. Pay heed to the real king, instead.”
So Kellin knew what the other prisoners believed, and was I surprised? Not much. Dirt could only conceal the striking change in the color of my hair for so long, and my eyes were no longer even hazel; they were gray going on blue. If Elden hadn’t insisted on the full complement of contestants, I would have been killed weeks ago.
“Kneel!” Aaron shouted in his nasty buzz of a voice. “Kneel, you of the old blood! Kneel before the new blood! Kneel before your king!”
Petra—tall, dark-haired, beauty mark beside her mouth, green silk dress, complexion as white as cottage cheese—shouted, “Kneel, old blood! Kneel, old blood!”
The others—there couldn’t have been more than sixty, seventy at most—took up the cry. “Kneel, old blood! Kneel, old blood! Kneel, old blood!”