Chapter 4 Chapter 4

My father found me forty minutes before the Trial, which meant he'd been planning to find me for considerably longer than that.

"Voss doesn't lose to unranked wards." He said it the way he said most things — not a warning, just a fact he expected the world to rearrange itself around. "Whatever's happening with Ashgrave's boy and this girl, that's his mess. Don't make it yours by embarrassing this house in front of every proctor who matters."

"Wouldn't dream of it."

He left before I could decide whether that had been permission to hurt her or a threat about what happened if I didn't. With my father, it was rarely worth the effort of separating the two.

I found Isolde exactly where I expected — perched on the training yard wall like she'd been carved there specifically to watch, pale and pleased in a way that made my skin want to crawl right off my body.

"You petitioned for this," I said. Not a question. I'd known within about four seconds of reading the notice board; Isolde didn't do subtle, she did efficient, and forcing an unranked girl into a formal Trial before she'd learned a single house's dueling protocol was efficient in exactly the way Isolde liked her cruelty.

"I petitioned for fairness." She examined her nails, unbothered. "She killed a registered enforcer bare-handed. Seemed only right to see what she does against someone who actually knows how to fight."

"And if I hurt her."

"Then you've done exactly what your house expects of you, and I've learned exactly what I wanted to know." She finally looked at me, and there was something under the boredom that read, for just a second, like real hunger. "And if she hurts you — well. That tells me something too, doesn't it."

I didn't have a good answer for that, mostly because I didn't like any of the ones I could think of.

She was already in the circle when I got there. No house colors, obviously — just the grey provisional cut, sleeves shoved to the elbow, weight balanced in a stance that belonged to someone who'd learned to fight in places that didn't have rules, watching me cross the yard with an expression that gave away exactly nothing.

"Voss," she said. "I heard you're the one who's supposed to like me."

"I'm the one who's supposed to make you regret existing, technically. Isolde's words, not mine." I rolled my shoulders, found my mark on the stone, tried to make the whole thing sound lighter than it felt. "For what it's worth, I'd rather not."

"Comforting."

Proctor Reyes called the rules from the edge of the circle in the flat cadence of someone who'd delivered them a thousand times — first blood or submission, no shift past the second stage, no strikes after a called yield — and around the yard's edge, students I recognized and several I didn't were already three-deep and getting deeper, because word had apparently gotten around that the unranked girl who'd killed an Ashgrave enforcer was about to fight someone who mattered.

The bell rang before I'd finished deciding how hard I actually intended to try.

She came in fast and low, nothing like the formal opening stance every ranked student got drilled into by age twelve — went straight for my knee like she had somewhere better to be and my leg was in the way of getting there. I sidestepped, barely, and she used the miss to redirect her own momentum into an elbow that caught my ribs hard enough to steal the smugness right out of my next breath.

"That's not dueling," I said, resetting, genuinely startled for the first time since the bell.

"No," she agreed, already moving again. "It's winning."

I stopped trying to be charming about it after that.

She fought like nobody had ever told her fights were supposed to look a certain way — no wasted motion, no showmanship, every strike aimed at ending things rather than looking good doing it. I was better trained. I'd had a decade of proctors correcting my form, house tutors drilling technique until it lived in my spine instead of my head. But technique assumes your opponent is going to fight the fight you were trained for, and she wasn't playing by any ruleset I recognized, which meant half my training was actively working against me.

I caught her wrist mid-strike, finally, more instinct than plan, twisting to put her off-balance the way I'd done a hundred times in a hundred formal bouts —

— and the whole world went white at the point of contact.

Heat tore up my arm like I'd grabbed a live wire, sharp enough that I heard myself make a sound that wasn't remotely dignified, and for one suspended second neither of us moved, both of us staring down at the place where my hand had closed around her wrist like it had personally rewritten something neither of us had agreed to.

Oh, I thought, with the strange, distant clarity of a man watching his own life reroute in real time. That's what that feels like.

Her eyes came up to mine, wide, furious, and — underneath the fury, so brief I might have imagined it — something that looked exactly as unmoored as I felt.

"That's twice now," I said, quieter than I meant to.

"Let go of me."

"Working on it." I wasn't, particularly. My hand didn't seem to be taking instructions from the rest of me at the moment.

Somewhere at the circle's edge, the low roar of the crowd had gone strange — not louder, quieter, the specific quiet of several dozen ranked wolves realizing they were watching something they didn't have a category for. I heard Reyes's voice cut through it, sharp with an alarm that hadn't been in his tone a minute ago, calling for the bout to halt. I heard, closer, a voice I recognized as Thane's, saying my name once, low, like a warning he hadn't finished deciding whether to give.

I didn't look away from her to check. I couldn't, exactly — every part of me still narrowed down to the point where my hand met her skin, heat and pulse and something that felt disturbingly like recognition, like my body had been waiting its whole life to be introduced to something it hadn't known it was missing.

Across the circle, through the ringing in my ears, I caught Isolde's face for just a second before the crowd shifted and swallowed the sightline whole.

She wasn't smiling anymore.