The first scream came through the relay while Kavie was removing his coat.
It was distant and distorted by the crystal, more breath than voice, but Valerie knew the sound of a man being hurt where help could not reach him.
Kavie folded the coat over the back of his chair.
"Who?" Valerie asked.
The relay hissed.
A soldier's voice answered through it. "Corporal Tern, sir. Found above the old mint. Six others with him."
Valerie knew Tern. He chewed cloves before inspection and wrote letters for soldiers embarrassed by their spelling. He had carried Mira home once when she twisted her ankle during a festival.
"Proceed," Kavie said.
K turned his head slightly toward Valerie. "Do not give him both fights."
"They are my father's soldiers."
"That is why he chose them."
Another cry cracked through the relay.
Valerie's grip tightened around the spear.
Kavie set his sword point against the floor. "He is right, you know. I chose people you could name. Grief is such an imprecise instrument until one gives it a face."
"You talk too much for a man who claims to see the future," K said.
"Only the immediate future. And only intention." Kavie lifted his blade. "Conversation makes intention visible."
K drew the short sword he had taken from the garrison guard.
His hand shook so badly that the point clicked twice against the wall.
Kavie's pleasure faded into concentration.
"You burned brightly beneath Bellfoundry Hill," he said. "Now the fire will not answer."
"It is shy around priests."
"I am not a priest."
"Then it has good judgment."
K moved.
He did not charge. He stepped left, caught the chain of a wall lamp with his sword guard, and pulled it down between them. Oil burst across the stones. The corridor shifted from white light to leaping shadow.
Kavie was already elsewhere.
His blade passed through the place K's neck had been.
K turned the dodge into a low cut. Kavie lifted his foot before the steel arrived, stepped on the flat of K's sword, and drove an elbow toward his temple.
K caught the elbow on his forearm. The impact bent him sideways. He recovered with a thrust toward Kavie's ribs.
Kavie parried before the thrust began.
Steel rang.
Again.
Again.
K attacked in the compact forms Valerie had seen her father teach senior guards—the old Beldor school, stripped of ceremony and made mean by narrow walls. Kavie answered every cut at its birth. He moved before K committed, not faster than thought but alongside it, occupying the space intention required.
K changed schools.
His shoulders loosened. The sword dropped low. He adopted the forward balance of Welhemdor monster hunters, where the first rule was that a creature larger than a house could not be parried.
Kavie smiled. "Northern training."
"Northern mistakes."
K slashed the lamp chain.
Kavie turned aside from the falling iron.
It was the first time he moved after K rather than before him.
K drove in.
His pommel struck Kavie's mouth. Blood brightened the other man's lower lip. K hooked a foot behind Kavie's ankle and used the wall to deny him balance. The short sword rose beneath Kavie's ribs.
Valerie saw the opening.
Kavie saw it too late.
For one clear instant, K had him.
Then K's injured hand failed.
His fingers opened around the hilt without permission.
The blade turned. Its point tore cloth instead of flesh.
Kavie caught K by the pierced palm.
K made no sound, but every muscle in his body locked. Kavie twisted. K went to one knee.
"There it is," Kavie whispered. "The cost."
He drove a knee into K's chest.
K struck the floor on his back. The suppression crystal beneath his shirt flashed once, black as a hole burned in the world. A thread of dark flame crawled across his collarbone.
It vanished before reaching his shoulder.
Kavie stepped back, breathing harder now. Blood from his lip marked his teeth when he smiled.
"Again."
K rolled to his feet.
Not quickly. Not gracefully. He used the wall and pretended he had meant to.
The relay crackled.
"Three fled into the dye quarter," the lieutenant reported. Behind his voice came the crash of a door. "We have them contained."
"Let one believe he has escaped," Kavie said. "Follow him to the others."
Valerie stepped toward the relay.
Kavie's sword point found the hollow beneath K's jaw.
"Stay," he told her, "or he loses the next exchange before he begins it."
K's eyes remained on Kavie. "He plans to do that anyway."
Valerie did not move.
Kavie lowered the point.
K attacked without warning.
This time he abandoned form. His injured hand twitched; his shoulders gave false starts; his feet broke rhythm as the drug and blood loss argued over his balance. He made weakness unreadable by refusing to correct it.
Kavie retreated two steps.
K cut high. Missed. Stumbled.
Kavie entered to finish him.
K dropped the sword.
The stumble had been real. The choice following it was not.
He caught Kavie's sword wrist between both forearms, turned beneath it, and drove the broken end of the lamp chain around Kavie's elbow. Valerie understood the trap only when K braced one boot against the wall and pulled.
Kavie's arm locked straight.
K's discarded blade lay at Valerie's feet.
"Now," K said.
She kicked it toward him.
He caught it with his boot, sent it spinning upward, and closed his good hand around the grip. The edge stopped against Kavie's throat.
A bead of blood appeared.
Kavie went still.
The relay went still with him.
K leaned close, breath ragged. "You see intention," he said. "Not consequence."
Kavie's eyes moved to the black veins climbing K's wrist.
"And you mistake a moment for victory."
He opened his trapped hand.
A narrow needle slid from beneath his sleeve into K's forearm.
K recoiled. Kavie tore free of the chain, struck the sword from his hand, and hit him twice—once beneath the ribs, once behind the ear.
K remained standing through the first blow.
The second put his shoulder against the wall.
He pushed away from it.
Kavie struck him a third time.
K fell to one knee.
"What did you give him?" Valerie demanded.
Kavie examined the needle and flicked away a dark drop of K's blood. "Nothing he has not enjoyed already. A reminder for the body."
Valerie threw the spear.
Kavie tilted his head. The point passed close enough to move his hair and buried itself in the chair behind him.
He had moved before her arm did.
"Better," he said.
Valerie drew Saughtrick's sword.
K planted one hand on the floor and tried to rise. "Wait."
The relay came alive again.
This scream was clear.
Valerie knew the voice.
Sergeant Lavin had served beneath her father for eleven years. He had brought soup when Mira was ill and lost deliberately when Valerie first learned stones. Through the relay, he tried not to beg. That restraint broke something in her more completely than begging would have.
"Captain's daughter," the lieutenant's voice said, uncertain and close to the crystal. "They want to know if—"
Kavie crossed the corridor and turned the relay cage in his hand.
"She can hear you," he said.
Lavin dragged in one ruined breath. "Valerie, don't—"
The transmission broke beneath a blow.
Kavie watched her listen.
Not the relay. Her.
He wanted the precise moment grief became action. He wanted to know which name, which sound, which memory could purchase control of her body.
Mira's face rose behind his.
Not as she had died.
Worse: alive. Flour on one cheek. Laughing over a loaf that had collapsed in the oven. Telling Valerie that every difficult person was not secretly a criminal. Asking her to come home earlier. Waiting at a table Valerie would never see again.
Kavie's face returned.
"Your sister was braver," he said.
K, still on one knee, looked up sharply. "Valerie. That is the door he wants."
She knew.
She saw the corridor as clearly as any training ground. Kavie's weight rested lightly on his rear foot. His sword hung low because he wanted her to attack his left side. K was between them, poisoned and barely conscious. If she lunged, Kavie would turn her momentum across K's line. If she waited, they might find another opening.
She knew all of it.
She also knew Mira had died hearing this man speak pleasantly.
There are choices the mind makes.
There are choices the wound has been making for years.
Valerie tightened both hands around her father's sword.
"I know," she told K.
Then she lunged anyway.
Kavie moved exactly where she had known he would.
Her first cut found air. He caught her wrist, turned her shoulder, and placed her body between himself and K. K forced himself upright and changed his strike to avoid her.
That mercy created the opening.
Kavie's heel struck K beneath the jaw.
K went down.
Valerie tore one hand free and drove her elbow backward. It connected with Kavie's ribs. He exhaled, shifted his grip, and pressed two fingers against the nerve beneath her ear.
White pain swallowed the corridor.
She dropped to one knee but kept the sword.
Kavie bent close. Blood from K's near-victory still lined his throat.
"There you are," he whispered again.
Valerie drove her head into his face.
His nose broke with a satisfying crack.
For the first time, Kavie's composure disappeared.
He struck her with the brass relay.
The floor rose into darkness.
She heard K moving somewhere beyond sight. Heard steel scrape. Heard Kavie curse once, quietly and without brilliance.
Then a boot struck the side of her head.
The last sound Valerie heard was the relay opening to another scream.
When Kavie spoke, his pleasant voice had returned.
"Bring the carriage below," he ordered. "The woman and the black-flame bearer go to the arena."