“Please, enter.Food and rooms await you within.Anything you wish, you need only ask the servants here for.I ask only that you use tonight to make sure you are as prepared as you can be for the morning.We want to give the people a good show.”
Selene heads back inside and the gladiators follow her.I go with them, moving smoothly in her wake.I head in with the other gladiators to the main hall, where food has been set out for all of us.
I move to the plates of food, taking what I want and wondering what our accommodation will be like for tonight.Lorelei comes over to me, nodding.
“You’re a former champion of Aetheria’s arena?”
“I did what I had to do to survive,” I say.
“And yet tomorrow, you’ll fight for glory.”
“I’m fighting to make sure Selene doesn’t come to rule Aetheria,” I tell her.
“Whereas I fight because my queen has commanded it,” Lorelei says.“She wishes to show your people that they do not have the strength of the Arborians.”
“I hope you survive the contests,” I tell her.
She shrugs.“I will or I won’t.”
A servant comes to us with wine.Lorelei takes a goblet and I do the same, but even as I do so, she puts a hand on my wrist.
“Don’t,” she says.“I sense plants in yours that have nothing to do with grapes.”
I hesitate, guessing she can sense different plants as easily as I can sense the nature of beasts.Poison.Lorelei has detected poison.I look at the servant, a young man in a pale tunic with an increasingly desperate expression.
“I’m sorry,” he says.“It wasn’t meant to kill you.”
“What, then?”I demand.
“Just to slow you down a little, just to make sure.”
“You were going to drug me?”I say.That could be just as fatal as poisoning, slowing my reactions for the fights to come.
“It wasn’t my idea.”
“Then who?”I demand.
“I can’t say.Iwon’t.”
He lunges at me in the middle of saying it, with a knife in his hand.
Some instinct makes me throw myself sideways as he lunges, thrusting at me with a speed and violence that might have proved fatal if he’d taken me by surprise.As it is, though, I manage to twist out of the way of the blow, slamming the heel of my palm into his jaw and sending him staggering back.He rights himself, obviously intending to come forward again, even as my heart hammers with sudden fear.
A beam of violet magic burns through him as he steps forward, disintegrating a section of his chest.He staggers forward one more step, then collapses, knife falling from nerveless fingers as he dies.
Selene stands there with her hand raised, a look of such anger on her face that I know she had nothing to do with this latest assassination attempt.
“This is your hospitality?”I ask her anyway.I need to know I’m safe here.
She shakes her head.“This should not have happened.”She raises her voice.“I will find the person behind this, and they will face justice for it in due course.Know this: all the gladiators here are honored guests.Allof them.You are to see that no harm comes to them.If it does, I’ll hold every guard and trainer near them responsible.”
I can feel the fear around me at her words, truly feel it, thanks to the fragment of my powers that lets me tap into the primal instincts of others.It seems Selene is truly angry that her followers would continue to try to protect her from me by taking me out of the contest.
It means, for almost the first time in Ironhold, I’m probably safe.At least for tonight.
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
I don’t sleep well that night, despite Selene’s promises of safety.It isn’t just that I’m worried about the possibility of assassins stalking the halls of Ironhold, it’s because the whole place brings back far too many memories for me.I might be in one of the finer rooms in the fortress tonight, but my memory is filled with all the nights I spent in a simple cell, waiting for the possibility of death in the morning.
