“They’ve already decided the winner.” Acheron’s smooth delivery indicated he was letting her in on an insider secret. “If only everyone in the crowd knew their bets were rigged... but fools are easily parted from their coin.”
“They’d still pay,” Dasha said. “They crave the rise and the fall. The crash one night makes the rise on another so much sweeter. If we didn’t know better, we would do just the same.”
Acheron sat back with a perturbed frown.
The marionettes were guided into place on either side of the joust barrier. Elloven leaned in for a better look when she thought she saw one of them crying. She squinted to get a better focus, but all she saw was its mouth moving, though not in the hinged way of a puppet.
Both “men” ran at each other with lances. The words one and two were shouted in a ripple along the crowd, men and women waving their fists in support of whomever they’d spent their coin backing. A lance pierced the chest of the second murderer, and very convincing blood bloomed on his shirt and spilled down his chest and back, where the tip protruded. The other puppet struggled to free his lance, which made the crowd laugh, but it wasn’t funny, not to Elloven.
They weren’t real, so why did it feel real? Why could she not shake the terrible fear she was watching a man be murdered?
Estelar’s hand on her wrist caused her to look down and find she was digging her nails into her leather pants.
“Yes, Aelloven, they are real. Real men who committed real crimes. We have no prisons here, only consequences,” he explained, so calmly and evenly, she struggled to believe what he was saying was true, despite what her eyes told her, because how could anyone with a soul speak so neutrally about executing men for sport?
Stars blinked through her eyes. She pursed her mouth and sucked in short, quick breaths, as her mother had taught her. A finger twitched. She repressed the urge because she didn’t have the heart for Taven’s fussing, but she knew what was coming next if she couldn’t get a handle on her nerves.
“Each of them knew this could be their fate when they conspired with the murderer.”
Elloven’s eyes closed. Silent and still, she counted each of her ten fingers, her ten toes. Memorized the texture of her seat, how the air smelled and tasted. “What happens to the winner?”
Estelar grinned. “Wait and see.”
But she couldn’t bear to see any more. It was barbaric and inhumane, and even Taven seemed to be caught up in the spell. Nothing that had happened in Rivenholde had left her feeling foreign and out of place until then, and she felt a scream building, but she wasn’t quick enough to keep it inside.
Everything around her came to a crashing halt. The crowd, the marionettes, everyone was caught in suspended animation. Nothing and no one moved. Even the air had stilled. All except for her.
She couldn’t stay there. She couldn’t watch. She couldn’t control what would happen if she did.
When Elloven leaped from her seat, the spell broke. She pushed past Estelar and down the short row to the entrance of the box. Taven’s worries followed, but she lifted a hand and screamed no, a word she could neither hear nor feel in the melee but knew had happened because of how much lighter she was. She’d needed to get that out since the moment she’d looked into the dead eyes of one of the men she’d frozen.
“Leave her,” Estelar commanded in the distance as she raced down the steps and out into the fairway.
Elloven didn’t stop running until she found a spot where she could be alone, behind the amphitheater, along a row of outbuildings that seemed to be for workers.
“Your first marionette show is always shocking, though you might be the only one who has stopped time because of it.”
Elloven startled at the sudden intrusion of the woman from supper who had declined to socialize or even introduce herself. Velanthe. Sister of Estelar and Laxius, which made her Elloven’s aunt. She held a pipe that billowed with a sweet-smelling smoke.
She rubbed her arms. “How can anyone watch such a thing? It’s horrifying.”
“Stopping time? Oh, I agree. You can’t know the consequence of such a choice.”
“You know that’s not what I meant!” Elloven exclaimed. “Incarcerate criminals for their crimes, of course, but... this?” She thrust her arms toward the massive structure, where boos and cheers rose in crescendo, muted but still painfully clear. Another man had died probably. “This is barbaric. Not even allowing them to fight of their own accord but dangling them and...”
“To others, a scaffold and noose might be considered more barbaric,” Velanthe replied. Her cheeks puckered when she drew in smoke. She was a lovely woman, though the deep lines around her face implied an age far beyond what she likely was. Elloven could see Estelar in her, Acheron too. It made her that more curious about the elusive Laxius. “A man should settle his debts before the end.”
“We don’t treat people like animals, no matter what they’ve done. The noose is quick.”
“Too quick for the soul to repent, which is an even darker punishment than what you just witnessed.”
“What? Repent what?” Elloven demanded. “Is death not the ultimate repentance?”
“Their crimes in this life. We must all endure a review in our final hours, and the review determines our next destination. Another plane. Another body. Another light.” Smoke curled with her deep laugh. The scent was noxious and slightly intoxicating. “Or it did, before Infinita Mori became a tomb itself.”
Elloven was slowly losing her sense of rightness about the place, and she couldn’t let it happen. She needed to be in Rivenholde. She knew she did. In her bones. Her blood. If she started questioning everything, she’d never stop.
“You were brave coming here,” Velanthe said. It almost sounded like a threat.
