Wolfless

Losing Well

The first Trial came four days later in the pit under the north tower, and I had been intending to lose it since the moment the steward said the word service.

Losing well is a craft. Anybody can be beaten. The trick is being beaten in a way that answers a question nobody has asked out loud, and coming out of it assigned where you want to go.

Here's the arithmetic. The lowest work detail in this house is the drain crews, who scrub the runs under the kennels, which is nowhere. Second lowest is ash detail. Ash empties the grates along the household corridor, past the door of the eastern archive, twice a day, in front of everybody, and therefore invisible.

Ash goes to wards who are physically useless and have been publicly proved to be.

They put me in against a Draven girl called Petra. Seventeen, four inches taller than me, not yet in command of any of it; one of those big loose bodies that's only been strong for about a year and is still surprised by itself. The pit was full, because it's always full for the ward matches. The houses' sons come and watch the way you watch somebody else's dogs, cheerful and slightly bored, and eat.

Corwin called the pairings off the rail, and when he got to mine he found me in the sand and drew two fingers across his throat, slowly, so I'd know it had been chosen rather than drawn.

Petra came straight at me, which she didn't mean as a kindness but which was one.

The pain isn't the hard part. The hard part is that everything in you knows what to do. My mother's brother taught me to fight in a wheat store when I was nine, and a body doesn't unlearn that, so when Petra dropped her left shoulder and telegraphed the whole thing half a second early, my hands wanted to be elsewhere and my hip wanted to turn, and there was a version of the following two seconds where she went down in the sand and stayed there.

I let her hit me.

It took her three goes to do it properly, which was embarrassing for both of us. After that she found the range and it stopped being difficult for her at all.

I stayed up about as long as a wolfless girl ought to stay up and not a moment longer, and when I went down I went down badly, on purpose, the way a body goes down when it has never been taught anything. Sand in the mouth. The pit made the noise pits make. Somebody up in the gallery laughed, high and delighted, at the particular comedy of a small thing being broken by a large one.

She got my ribs twice on the ground before the steward called it, and the second one was worse than she meant it to be, I think.

Four days, I thought, with my cheek in the sand. Four days and the ash detail and a corridor with a door on it.

That was when I made the mistake. Not the fight. The fight was clean. Afterwards, in the mouth of the pit where they let the losers out, I turned my head, and of all the faces along the rail there was one that hadn't been enjoying any of it.

Rhys Draven was standing at the far end with his arms folded, and he wasn't looking at Petra, and he wasn't looking at my face.

He was looking at my hands.

I had one whole second to work out what that meant and another to work out that a second was too long, and then I was through the gate and into the dark of the under-corridor with my ears ringing.

He caught me at the stair.

He didn't touch me. He put himself into the width of the passage, which comes to the same thing and needs less explaining afterwards, and the noise of the pit came down through the boards over our heads and made a small private room out of a place with no walls in it.

Up close he smelled of rain and cold iron and something underneath that, and my body did a thing about it that I intend to take to my grave.

"You could have taken her," he said.

"Sir?"

"Third exchange. She dropped her shoulder, you moved your weight onto your back foot, and then you put it back." Flat, the way he'd read the roll. "You corrected. Nobody corrects towards a beating. So either you've never been taught anything, in which case you wouldn't have known to move at all..."

He stopped.

I watched a man arrive at a conclusion he hadn't gone looking for, and I watched him decide, while I was standing there, not to say the second half of it out loud.

"What's your name?" he said instead.

Which was absurd. He'd read it off a roll four days earlier in front of six riders and half a county. He knew my name. He had said my name and something had happened to him, and he had come down into a servants' stair in the dark to make me say it to him myself, and neither of us was going to admit that was what this was.

"Wren, sir."

The wire went taut.

His jaw moved, once.

"Wren," he said. "Of Vale." And I have never in my life wanted so badly to sit down.

Then he stepped out of the passage and let me by, and I went up that stair with my ribs screaming and my hands shaking, and by the top of it I'd worked out exactly how much trouble I was in.

I came to Hollowmere to be a nobody with a bucket.

Four days, and I'd become the one ward in this building the heir of House Draven could pick out of a crowd of ninety with his eyes shut.