Leo stood up out of the rubble coughing blood. He spat red into the sand and looked up at the box with eyes gone yellow at the edges.
"How..." he wheezed, straightening. "How are you going to kill me? From up there? Come down here and DIE, you bastard!"
"I am not going to kill you, Your Highness." Viktor stepped off the edge of the supervisor's box and did not fall so much as decline to acknowledge gravity, drifting down into the arena like a leaf of violet fire, his coat settling around him. "I am going to give you exactly enough rope."
"What did you SAY to me?!"
"Come and collect your rope."
Leo came.
What followed, in the estimation of every weapon master who would later describe it, was the finest swordsmanship any of them would witness in their lifetimes.
