The guards drag me down to the lift, and after reinforcements pile out—shame burns in me that they weren’t even needed—they shove me in, efficiently tying my hands as the contraption lurches. We descend into darkness, with only a single lantern above us to light the eerie metal tube passing on all sides.

  I should keep my shame iced, should stick with my breathing and stay sharp here, but the shock is too much. The disappointment. The utter letdown—I was so close. I had the book in my hands. My father’s book. The answers I needed to get Gaxna back. To do something, instead of feeling so flooding powerless like I have since I lost her.

  My shoulders shake and I realize I’m crying and for a long minute there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m trapped inside a metal tube with two guards I have no chance of defeating, apparently being taken to fight for my crimes, and all I can think about is Gaxna, and my father, and the world—but especially Gaxna. Locked up in a pit under the temple because of me. It would have been better if we’d never met, which only makes me cry all the harder because it’s the last thing I’d wish for.

  The lift lurches to a halt, and I hear a voice call from outside.

  “All safe in the tube?”

  “Safe and prisoner in tow,” the taller guard, Jenelin, yells. It’s not much, but it’s enough to stop my tears. I take a deep shuddering breath and look around, making out a dim set of stairs in the lamplight.

  “Where are you taking me?” I ask.

  No answer. These guards have just listened to my weeping all the way down the tube, and they won’t even give me an answer. Slopholes.

  I seize onto that anger and ice the rest. This is not how a monastic is supposed to act, not the ideal state for responding to a desperate situation, but it’s the best I can do right now.

  “Fine,” I growl. “I don’t need you to talk anyway.”

  I slam myself into the nearer one, pushing him into the wall and bringing me into contact with his bare arm. He shoves me off like a newborn kitten, but in the brief instant of contact I read my answer through our touch: an arena, filled with gladiators wearing belts of coins, littered with the blood and bodies of the fallen. Roaring crowds line the seats above, reveling in the slaughter.

  Entertainment. I am to die for entertainment.

  Flood that. If I’m going to die, I will do it now, on my own terms.

  A crevice of light opens above, another guard opening the heavy gate. I sprint towards him, kicking off the wall to land a spinning heel into his neck. He stumbles back, choking, and I break out into the tower grounds. Thirty paces to the wall.

  Something heavy slams into me, pinning me to the ground, but I’m not done yet. I slam my head back, hitting someone hard enough to see stars and earning a grunt. I try again, the rest of me immobile, but a thick palm shoves my face into the gravel.

  “Jenelin,” he calls, not even sounding winded. “Get the tea.”

  A minute later they force something foul into my mouth, and the guard holds me there till my head gets fuzzy and my limbs go numb.

  “Good,” Jenelin says, his voice echoing, and they lift my limp body into a cart. The sun goes dim.

  I wake to cool stone and a pinch on the cheek.

  “Wake up, girl,” a weathered woman says, pinching me again. “Wake up. They’re almost done out there, and you’re next.”

  Shouts sound and I look to the side, through a barred gate to where a gang of Bamani men surround a solitary fighter, his comrades lying in the dirt around him. It’s the arena I saw in the guard’s mind.

  Floods. “I can’t—”

  “Thornbark should be wearing off by now,” she slurs in Daraanese. “You had a good sleep there. Stand up, it’ll help. Here.”

  She thrusts a staff at me and something about the worn feel of the wood, like the practice staves we used in the temple, clears the last of the fog from my brain. I suck in a breath, taking quick stock: I am locked in here with this woman, the gate behind her barred. If what she says is true, in a few moments I’m going to have to go out there and fight.

  No time for questions, and I can’t trust her to tell the truth anyway—but her thoughts will. I seize her wrist. “The keys. How do I get out?”

  A broad man appears in her thoughts, laden with wealth and holding a large circle of keys. No point attacking this old woman, then. Peneiwa, her name is.

  “Peneiwa. Are they going to kill me?”

  A roar goes up from the crowd, muddling her reply, and I glance back to see the Bamani men raising their clubs in victory. Attendants run into the ring, dragging away the bodies, and a sick feeling rises in my throat. I have never killed before, and I don’t want to do it now, not this way. I was trained to fight for justice, not just survival.

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  But if I let myself die, what happens to Gaxna? To Serei?

  A guard rattles the gate behind us and Peneiwa nods. “It’s your time. Be careful.”

  I run out. I have no idea what they’re throwing me up against—Serei criers are full of stories of the horrors of the Dahran gladiator pits—but I’m at least going to choose my ground. The arena is covered in ankle-deep sand, ringed by sandstone walls twenty paces high, with steep rows of seats rising beyond them. There’s no way I’m climbing out of here, and no high ground to speak of. At least they gave me a staff.

  It’s only then that I realize I’m dressed in a theracant’s robes, or some strange mockery of them. My hand flies to my chest, where I keep my father’s letter.

  It’s gone. And that is the deepest insult of all.

  Above me a giant voice rings out, calling something about an Uje Witch versus the Deul Menace. My match, then.

  I spin in a slow circle. There are gates set into the base of the wall every five paces or so, like the one I came from. I am disturbed to see most of them full, muscled and scarred fighters watching me with boredom or malice. I ice a rising dread and keep circling, holding my breath steady. I’ve only fought one Seilam Deul man, and it wasn’t much of a fight, but I have no idea what to expect here. The clarity that comes with deep breathing tells me the dread is not for my own life—I should have lost it many times over by now—but for the idea of killing a stranger here, in this made-up environment, for these people’s entertainment. Give me Ieolat, give me Nerimes, slops give me one of the guards from the tower, and I’ll fight. But this solitary man who steps out onto the sands, wearing his own bizarre mockery of the clinging Deul garb? He is no enemy of mine.

  Something relaxes inside me, the same part that drove me to attack the guards back at the tower. If I’m going to die, I’ll die on my own terms. Die a person Gaxna and my father would be proud of.

  And that means not killing an innocent person, no matter what the cost is.

  The Deul fighter trots toward me, and I’m surprised to see he actually has the milky eyes of the Deul—I got the sense from the last battle that, though the fighters were wearing Bamani armor, most of them were actually Daraanese. This lanky man—he has the Deul height, too—is the real thing.

  He limps, though he makes an effort to hide it, and that just cements my resolve. He raises his weapon, a ridiculous two-bladed spear I doubt came from the Deul, and yells something in a foreign tongue as he gets close.

  I’m not fooled. Every Deul I’ve met spoke some Ujeian.

  “You are no enemy of mine,” I say, grounding my staff in the sand. “Let us not fight for their pleasure.”

  “We have to,” he says, milky eyes confident. His right hand is missing two fingers. “Trust me. Fight.”

  He swings with the strange spear and I step out of its arc.

  “No.”

  The crowd boos, and he swings again. “Don’t worry. You’re slated to win this one.”

  “Win?” I ice the surprise that comes up, again dodging his blow, my mind spinning through the possibilities. Is this some ploy to put me off my guard? “We’re not fighting to the death?”

  “Not if you play along,” he growls, jabbing the spear at me dead-on. “You don’t have any coins, right? So fight.”

  I step aside to more boos. The announcer’s voice booms across the stands, something about a healer not wanting to fight.

  There is a threat implied in his voice, but I’ve already made up my mind. Still, I don’t understand everything here, and I was trained from a young age that knowledge can undo many disadvantages. “Coins? What do coins have to do with this?”

  That checks him for a moment. “Are you new to the city, too? Look, I’ll explain everything later. For now, just fight. Trust me.”

  That’s something I’ve never been good at. I dodge his attack without raising my staff. He’s wears only a few copper ravas around his neck, so I can likely take him if it comes to that.

  “No.”

  Sweat beads on his forehead as he again attacks, and the boos come louder when I roll under his blade and come up untouched.

  I grin. To hell with them. To hell with the crowd and the amaranth and a city that thinks I should have to fight for their entertainment because I tried to take back what is rightfully mine. To hell with all of them. This is not the fight they came to see, but maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe that’s something I can use.

  I grip the butt of my staff and hurl it out of the ring to a shocked silence, then outrage from above.

  The Duel man curses in his own tongue, and the jab that comes at me is real this time, fast enough I’m forced to jump to avoid it.

  “That’s better,” he says. “Keep at it. Just a couple more”—he swings and I dodge—“and you can take me down.”

  “Flood that. Take yourself down.”

  “Don’t you get it?” he growls, circling right and jabbing in again with the spear. His posture communicates it well ahead of time, and I sidestep. “We have to put on a show, or they really will kill us. Look, just knock me around a couple of times, then I’ll lie down in the sand and we’re done.”

  “Lie down in the sand?” I ask. “That’s all you have to do?”

  “And I’ll raise my hand,” he says. “The sign that I’m finished.”

  “Great.”

  I drop to the sand.

  The arena explodes in boos. I don’t care. I raise my hand, keeping an eye on the Deul to make sure I haven’t judged him wrong and he might actually try for a killing stroke. Instead, I see him forcing a smile and doing an awkward victory dance.

  I smile, remembering the amaranth’s last words. Now we see just what kind of fighters you Ujeians really are.

  “What kind of fighter am I?” I mutter to the sky. “The kind that can’t be pushed around.”

  Plus, I have an ally in Dahran, and a simple battle here wouldn’t have made news. Hopefully this—a rare Ujeian fighter in the arena, and then a total refusal to fight—will reach her ears.

  Rough hands grab me and drag me from the sands. If she realizes who that Ujeian fighter was, hopefully she can do something to get me out. It’s a thin hope, I know, but it’s better than nothing. The guard I read in the tower didn’t make up the blood or the bodies in his memory. This place is real.

  They drag me back to the cell and toss me in, then swing the gate closed. I allow myself a moment to lay there, letting out a deep shuddering breath.

  A throat clears behind me.

  I leap to my feet, spinning into Downward Cuts the Tide—only to lose it in shock.

  “Hiana?”

  My father’s ally stands calmly in the narrow cell, wrapped dress immaculate and face composed, like she regularly fills in for the arena guards.

  “Aletheia,” she agrees, stacked necklaces of coins bending the air with vitality, though not so strongly as the amaranth. “That was—quite a fight.”

  “What are you doing here? Are you here to get me out?”

  She chuckles at this. “Get you out? I’m the one who put you in here.”