Chapter 3: Step Into It
"Two to one on the wingleader," Garrick announces to the drill hall, standing on a bench with a ledger. "Three to one he does it inside two minutes. Five to one she puts him on his back again. Long odds somebody cries."
"Who's betting on crying?" someone shouts.
"Bodhi."
"I said maybe," Bodhi Durran protests from the front row, where he's sitting with his long legs stretched out and a look of fond, unhelpful amusement on his face. He's Xaden's cousin, and has the same dark hair and the same gold flecks in his eyes, but none of the stillness. "I said someone might cry. I didn't say who."
You ignore all of it. You stand at the edge of the chalk circle in your sparring leathers with your hair braided tight and two practice daggers in your hands, rolling your shoulders, trying to remember how breathing works.
The whole garrison has turned out. Every rider not on patrol, half the infantry, a couple of the menders, the cook. Somebody's even dragged in a bench for the outpost commander, who is pretending she's here to supervise and is very obviously here for the gossip.
Up in the rafters, wedged into the high windows, there are two enormous eyes. One gold. One a deep, cool amber. Cróga and Sgaeyl, side by side, their heads crammed through the openings that were absolutely not built for dragons.
"I do not like this," Cróga says in your head.
"You don't have to like it."
"Sgaeyl says her rider has not slept."
"Good."
"Sgaeyl says you have not slept either. She says she could hear you thinking from the ridge."
You glare up at the window. Sgaeyl blinks at you, slow and serene. You have the deeply uncomfortable sense of being judged by someone who has seen several centuries' worth of idiots and has filed you under a specific subheading.
Across the circle, Xaden steps onto the mat.
He's in black sparring leathers, sleeves rolled to the elbow, a practice blade in each hand. He doesn't look at the crowd. He doesn't look at Garrick on his bench. He looks at you, only you, with that dark, level, unsettling focus, and the drill hall goes quiet around the edges like someone has turned down a lamp.
"Lieutenant," he says.
"Wingleader."
The master of arms steps between you, reads out the rules in a bored voice, the same rules you've heard a hundred times. First to yield or first pinned. No signets. No permanent injuries. Then he steps back, and lifts his hand, and drops it.
Xaden doesn't move.
Neither do you.
It goes on long enough that somebody in the crowd coughs. You circle. He circles. His weight is balanced dead center, perfectly even, nothing on the left, nothing on the right. You watch his shoulders, his hips, his feet. You look for a hitch, a habit, anything.
There's nothing. He's telling the truth. It's gone.
So you do the only thing left. You stop looking for his weakness and fight.
You go in fast and low. He meets you. Steel rings on steel, practice edges dull but the shock of it real all the way up your forearms. You spin off, he follows, you duck a cut that would have tapped your shoulder and come up inside his guard and he's already gone, sliding back, his blade flicking toward your ribs and you barely turn it.
It's not like last time. Last time, he didn't know you. Now he knows you better than anyone in the hall. He knows you lead with your right on a feint. He knows you hate fighting backward and drift toward the wall. He knows you'll take a hit to land one. He's flown beside you every day for a year and he has paid attention to every single thing you do, and it's all there in the way he fights you, each cut and block a sentence that says I see you, I see you, I see you.
And here's what you didn't expect. You know him too.
You know he breathes out before he commits. You know he's patient until the half-second he isn't. You know that when he wants something, he gets very still first.
Two minutes pass. Garrick swears and crosses something out in his ledger.
Three minutes. The hall has stopped cheering. It's just the sound of boots on the mat and steel and two people breathing hard.
Four. He drives you back toward the chalk. You're tiring, your arms burning, your shoulder throbbing where he caught it with the flat of a blade a minute ago. He's tiring too. Sweat at his temples. A cut on his cheekbone where you clipped him with a hilt.
Then he goes very still.
You see it coming. You see it, and you know exactly what it is, and you have one half-second to decide.
You step into it.
He takes you down. It's clean and fast and almost gentle, a sweep and a turn, and your back hits the mat and the air goes out of you, and he's over you with one knee beside your hip and a practice blade resting lightly across your collarbone.
The hall explodes.
You don't hear it. You're looking up at him. He's breathing hard, a strand of dark hair stuck to his forehead, a thin line of red on his cheekbone, and he's looking down at you with an expression you've never seen on him before. It's not triumph. It's something closer to confusion.
"You saw that coming," he says, under the roar. "You stepped into it."
"I did."
"Why?"
You could lie. You don't.
"Because I didn't want to keep it anymore," you say. "Being the only one who ever beat you. I've been hiding behind it for a year. It was easier than the other thing."
His blade lifts off your collarbone. "What other thing?"
You swallow. "You asked me how long I was watching you."
He goes still. Truly still. Even his breathing stops.
"Two years," you tell him. "Since the joint maneuvers at the southern ridge. You flew a wyvern line into a gorge so narrow Sgaeyl's wingtips scraped stone, and I watched you from the back of a supply formation and thought, I'd like to know the person who'd do that. And then I watched you every chance I got, for two years, and I found that hitch because I'd seen you fight so many times I could have drawn every one of your matches from memory." You laugh a little, flat on your back in a chalk circle with the whole garrison shouting. "So, no. It wasn't luck. And it wasn't professional interest. I just looked at you for too long."
For a long moment, he doesn't say anything at all.
Then he tosses the practice blade aside. It clatters off the mat. He holds out his hand.
You take it. He pulls you up, and he doesn't let go. He just stands there in the middle of the chalk circle, holding your hand, while a hundred people yell and Garrick pays out a fortune and Bodhi shouts, "Is someone crying? Can I collect?"
"Not here," Xaden says quietly.
He takes you to the flight field. It's empty. The sky above the mountains is that flat, pale blue that comes just before snow, and the wind is cold enough to sting your sweaty face. The dragons have pulled their heads out of the drill hall windows and are watching from the ridge with an interest that should be illegal.
He stops in the middle of the trampled snow and turns to face you, and for once he doesn't look like a wingleader. He looks like a man who has rehearsed something many times and forgotten every word.
"I wrote eight drafts of the first note," he says.
"Garrick told me."
"There was a poem."
"Garrick told me that too."
His jaw flexes. "I'm going to kill him."
"You keep saying that."
"I keep meaning it." He breathes out, and the breath clouds between you. "I went looking for who you were after the challenge, and I found that drawer, and I told myself I was fixing an injustice. I told myself that for a year. That I wanted you in the wing because you were good. That I kept asking for the rematch because I wanted to know if it was luck." He shakes his head once. "I didn't care if it was luck. I wanted an excuse to stand that close to you again."
The wind gusts. Snow lifts off the field in a fine glittering sheet.
"You looked at me too long," he says. "I've been doing the same thing every day for a year. I just didn't have the nerve to step into it."
You step into it.
You close the space between you, grab the front of his leathers in both fists, and kiss him.
He makes a sound against your mouth, low and startled, and then his hands come up, one at the back of your neck and the other at the small of your back, and he kisses you back like he's been waiting, like he planned this in eight drafts and threw every one of them away. He tastes like cold air and something warmer underneath. His thumb strokes once along your jaw, so careful you could cry, and you're very glad Bodhi isn't here to collect.
Up on the ridge, two dragons are making a noise you've never heard before. It takes you a moment to recognize it as laughter.
When you finally pull apart, his forehead stays against yours. His eyes are closed. There's still a little blood on his cheekbone where you clipped him.
"For the record," you murmur, "you still haven't won."
His eyes open. "I pinned you."
"I let you."
"That's not how challenges work."
"That's how this one worked." You smile against his mouth. "I'm keeping my title. You can have a rematch."
He laughs, really laughs, a short, rough sound that's mostly breath, and it's the best thing you've heard in two years of listening.
The next morning, there's a note on the duty roster.
Heavy cream paper. Black ink. That neat, engraved hand.
Lieutenant. Formal request for a second dinner. At your convenience. W.L. Riorson.
And under it, smaller, the ink a little shaky, as if it was written in a hurry before he could change his mind:
The poem is attached. Please burn it after reading.
You look down. There's a second sheet pinned behind the first, folded small.
Behind you, Garrick Tavis drops his spoon.