“But of course he thought she was stalling, and he tried to kill her again. She snatched the spectacles from his face. It was an overcast day; there was no blue for him to draft, and in moments he was hamstrung. She asked him then if he understood. He didn’t. She picked up a simple iron spear and told him to stop her. Of course it was impossible. He looked everywhere for blue. There was none. And then, as she came closer, he felt the reds and greens and yellows sliding into his eyes. He was a full-spectrum polychrome, and he’d never known.
“But having never used the colors, he couldn’t control them, couldn’t bind them to his will in the time he had. And she slew him as he screamed. He who has ears, let him hear.”
Kip looked around. Some of the scrubs were nodding, like this all made perfect sense. Others looked like he felt.
“He who looks through only one lens lives in darkness,” Teia murmured. He could tell she hadn’t just made that up. It had a weight of antiquity to it.
“Enough questions, we’ve got work here. Places!” Trainer Fisk said. And that was it. No explanation. Fantastic.
Forty-nine, a slight, awkward boy with crooked teeth, challenged forty-six as everyone expected he would. Forty-six was a beefy girl, nearly twice his size, but slow. If she lost, she would lose her fight token and her chance to challenge those above her, so it was do or die for both of them.
“What’s your strategy?” Teia asked Kip.
Forty-nine and forty-six approached the great wheels, each spinning one. Depending on where the whizzing counters landed, they would have different rules for their fight. It was another aspect of the Blackguard ethos: you never knew under what circumstances you might have to fight, or with what weapons. You could get lucky or unlucky, and you had to deal with it.
The boy’s roll landed at yellow and green. The girl’s at staves.
“What do you mean?” Kip asked, entranced by what was happening in front of them.
Shutters were drawn and the battleground was bathed in yellow and green light. The boy and girl walked to Trainer Fisk, who stood by a small podium, and they both pushed their fingers onto two points of black rock and then were given staves. They saluted each other and began fighting. They were awkward, so bad that even Kip might have had a chance against them.
The girl attacked, her first shot rattling hard against the boy’s block, and her very next swing going through and catching him on the side of the head. He fell heavily, not unconscious, but jellied.
The boy got up to his knees, then fell over again.
The girl was declared the winner, and forty-nine burst into tears. There was no way he could stay in the Blackguard. He was done.
“Don’t feel sorry for him,” Teia said. “Failing out may keep him from getting killed, either next month or down the line. The Blackguard can only be the best.”
“Someone is going to go home today for me,” Kip said.
She looked at him, quizzical. “So, you don’t have a strategy?”
He stared back. She wasn’t getting it. “Teia, I’m terrible. I’ll fight the best I can, but I’ll lose. It’s that simple.” He wasn’t going to disappoint Gavin any more than necessary.
Forty-eight went next-and instead of challenging forty-five, instead he challenged the girl at forty-six.
“Why’d he-”
“She’s already fought once, so she might be tired,” Adrasteia said.
And so it was. Forty-eight and forty-six fought a purely mundane fight-the colors he’d spun were colors that neither of them could draft. Forty-six won, and challenged forty-three. She won again, and challenged forty, but lost.
As he watched and pieced together why people were sometimes choosing to fight three places up and sometimes only the person directly above, Kip asked Teia questions. Pretty quickly he figured out that there was as much strategy here as at Nine Kings.
Oh hell no.
People would sometimes not fight their friends, because they didn’t want to make them lose places or challenge tokens. Other times people would fight those whom they thought were tired, or if there was a particular low-ranked fighter whom people thought was better than his spot, sometimes people would fight below him so that they could then leapfrog him.
In the bottom seven were people who’d already lost and were definitely going to fail out-those were assumed be less likely to fight hard, so others were more likely to challenge them.
With this setup, as Teia explained it to Kip, if someone was ranked lower than their ability deserved, they had a chance to climb all the way to the top, if they were that good. Practically, of course, it almost never happened. Fighting was exhausting, and having to fight again immediately if you won meant it was rare that anyone jumped up the rankings very far.
At the same time, it put tremendous pressure on those at the top not to lose even once. If they did, and the person they’d lost to also lost, they could lose numerous places by losing a single fight.
Whoever had designed the tests wanted to get Blackguards who performed well under tremendous pressure.
“By getting into the hierarchy higher than people think you deserve, Kip, you’ve pretty much guaranteed that you’re going to get challenged a lot,” Teia said.
Of course. If there was a safe fight in your block of three, you take that one. Kip would always be that safe fight.
“What do I care?” Kip asked. “It’s just beatings.”
“You know,” Teia said, “I can’t decide if you’re brave or stupid.”
Huh?
“If I fight you again, I’m going to win,” she said.
“You never know,” Kip said. “I might get lucky.”
She left. He barely noticed; he was watching the fights. Because he didn’t get any time in drafting practice, this was Kip’s first glimpse of what he assumed was normal drafting.
But most of the Blackguard trainees were monochromes, and the odds of drawing their color on the wheel weren’t good, so most of the fights were purely hand-to-hand or weapon-to-weapon. Or sometimes the wheel would give them their color, but weakly, so instead of trying to draft a color slowly, they’d go for a straight fight. Not many of the children were able to fight effectively while also slowly drawing in enough light to be able to use it after two or three minutes of fighting. Most of the fights didn’t last that long.
The fighters got a lot better quickly, though.
The last fighters in danger began their fight. A muscular boy got unlucky and fought a blue-drafting girl in blue light. She used bars of blue luxin to choke him out before he could cross the distance to her.
When he got up, furious, instead of going toward her, he marched over to Kip and shook his finger in his face. “You! You’re worse than me! You should be going home, you lardass. Not me.”
“You’re right,” Kip said quietly.
“You’re damn right I’m right! Why are you even here? Because your mother’s some whore who spread her legs for Gavin Guile? You’re a bastard. I’m the son of the dey of Aghbalu! This is bullshit!”
Kip knew what he should do. He should punch the boy. Destroy him somehow with a ferocity that let everyone know, once again, that Kip was not to be crossed. He’d already done it with the bully Elio. Apparently once wasn’t enough. One story, people could disbelieve.
But Kip didn’t want to be the boy who was the crazy, erratic bastard. The one whom people tiptoed around because he might hurt someone with little or no provocation. He looked inside himself for that fury he knew was there for the boy insulting his mother, but today it was just an ache. He had no violence in him now.
“Is this what I am to be?” Kip asked. Some part of him wanted to weep.
“What?” the boy snarled. “I wasn’t done with you.”