“None of that will help you,” I say.“Who sent you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he replies.I send the bird to land on his shoulder and he flinches, obviously remembering the way a flock of them tried to peck out his eyes.This one could do it easily now, although I would never allow it.
“You know who I am,” I say.It isn’t a question.“Which means you knowwhatI am: a beast whisperer.I saw you through the eyes of the birds.I know you were talking to another man who paid you to attack me.Who was he?Why did he tell you to ambush me?”
“I’m not saying anything to you,” he says.
I look him in the eyes.“You just tried to attack a senator of Aetheria.What do you think will happen to you if I drag you in front of First Senator Rowan?You know what we used to mean to one another?”
He looks nervous now, shaking slightly.
“Or I could deal with the problem myself,” I say.“Have you ever seen a body picked clean by carrion crows?”
It’s not something I would actuallydoto him, but thankfully, he doesn’t know that.“I heard… I heard you had a noble gnawed to death by rats.”
I swallow back the feelings of guilt and disgust that come to me with that memory.It’s true, I did it.It was after the noble in question had spent most of an evening torturing me in every way she could, threatening to have my mother and my village killed, trying everything she could to break me in revenge for the death of her daughter in the arena.But I still did it, and it weighs on my conscience.
Right now, though, it means I have a reputation that is making my would-be attacker quake in fear.
“I don’t know who paid for us to hurt you,” he says.“I’d tell you if I did.I promise.Just that we were hired at one of the pit fights.People don’t like the way you’re going to interfere with them.”
“Thank you,” I say, punching him hard enough to send him spinning back into unconsciousness.It’s probably better than what would happen to him if I turned him in.I’m not interested in these three, but in who sent them.That means I need to find pit fights, and whoever is paying off potential killers in them.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: LYRA
“Do you know anything about pit fights taking place somewhere in the city?”I ask Marcus, almost as soon as I enter the rooms in the palace he uses as offices.
He looks up from a stack of paperwork, eyes widening slightly as he sees me.
“Lyra, are you all right?You look as though you’ve been in a fight.”
“I was,” I say.“Three men tried to attack me in the slums.”
“Did they hurt you?”Marcus says, rising and hurrying over to me, sounding horrified.“I can send for a healer.I-”
“I’m fine,” I assure him, grateful for the concern.He still puts his hands on my shoulders, looking me over carefully, as if determined to catalogue every bruise and scrape he can see.“I managed to question one of them.He didn’t know who sent him.”
Marcus sighs.“That’s all too common.Violent men have nothing better to do in the city than hire themselves out to the highest bidder.”
“But hewashired at some kind of ‘pit fight’, by someone who thought I was a danger to them,” I say.
“So of course you want to go out and look for one,” Marcus replies.
“And I thought that, as someone with an interest in fighters and the games, you might know where I could find one,” I say.
Marcus hesitates, but then nods.“I do,” he admits.“Give me a minute to change out of my toga and into some more normal clothes.”
“You don’t have to come with me,” I say.
“Of course I do,” he replies.“If you’re going somewhere like that, then you need me by your side.Besides, if someone tried to hurt you, then I want to help you to catch them.”
He hurries deeper into his rooms, and I resist the urge to watch as he changes into clothes more suited to going to look for a fight.He comes out wearing a grey tunic, belted at the waist, with a short sword at his hip.He has a cloak, the cowl of which he pulls up over his features.I do the same with my own cloak and we head out, Marcus leading the way into the city.
We aren’t heading for the poorest parts of Aetheria, which catches me by surprise, but instead to a district given over to entertainments for the nobles and the wealthier merchants.It’s a place of discrete dining establishments and theaters, performances by the most notable musicians and delicate philosophical debates.
And, apparently, pit fights.
Marcus pauses to have a whispered conversation with a young man loitering by the side of the street.I wouldn’t have picked him out as anything special, but Marcus seems to recognize something about him, and slips him a couple of coins.He taps a piece of graffiti behind the young man’s head, a stylized rendition of the arena.
