I am beginning to understand Clarice’s distaste for stickers. I woke up ready to prepare myself for the contest ahead, this game of Stoneball, but knew that I needed to begin with maintaining my kit. Sticker blood, even with the aid of magical fire, is an awful thing to deal with. My first hour and a half of the day is spent scrubbing my clothes and armor in the wash bin until my hands are raw. The sticker meat, on the other hand, turns out to be rather tasty, almost like fish. To my delight, there is a magical affix dwelling deep inside the meat. I don’t immediately recognize its symbol, and leave it as a mystery for the moment, not wanting to pull out all of my books in front of other people.

People give me room as I sit in front of the empty hearth, fiddling with the latches on my breastplate. One of the latches became a bit loose during the last fight, probably when that giant metal man slapped me in the chest. Samielle continues to sleep, his wounds still looking nasty, while Jess and Jasper speak at one of the tables. She casts glances at the man when she thinks no one is looking. She must really care about him.

“Do you want to talk about our failure?” Jor’Mari says, dropping down into one of the chair near me. He looks around the room, his eyes lingering on the ceiling. “The guild is probably listening to everything.”

That is something I hadn’t really considered before. When I was lost in the forest, when two competitors stabbed me and threw me off a cliff, where were they? In the first level of the tower, that woman revealed that they had seen everything that went on in this competition, why didn’t they intervene?

“They don’t care about us,” I say, tightening the latch on my armor with a copper piece. “If they cared, do you think they would have let so many people die? Would they have begun this competition with a slaughter?”

“I suppose,” Jor’Mari says, scratching his chin with his pointed nails. “Then again, why should they care?”

“Why should they care?” I set my armor aside and look at the man. “Aren’t they people? Didn’t that woman yesterday claim that it is the guild’s responsibility to protect people, to keep them safe from monsters and others? If they really care about protecting people, then they should make sure no one dies in their own competition.”

Jor’Mari rolls his eyes. “Don’t believe that drivel that they peddle. The first thing that you have to realize about magicians is that they are greedy and envious. Magicians’ guilds are suppressed all of the time when they begin to form, either by the local nobility or by the larger guilds. There is a simple reason for this; magician guilds are trying to build a power base to challenge the landed nobility. Their wealth is impressive, and they are able to accomplish goals on a wider scale than most countries, but all of it is for the benefit of personal power. The Willian Guild is no different.”

“To what end? If they do not have a higher drive, if they lie about their motivations, then why would they try to scrape power together?”

He looks at me as if I were a child, his eyes softening a moment later. “I will tell you what my father once told me. I remember the day perfectly; I had just had my nose bloodied during sparring practice with my cousin. For the entire day before, I spent my time fishing in the lake on the estate, didn’t catch anything, but it was a good day. All the while, my cousin spent his time in the training yard, working and working. It was evident from the moment that we started the duel that I would lose. Despite being an unendowed fifth son of a minor lord, Edwin never stopped trying to hone his skill with the sword. He beat me well and good, knocked me into the mud and broke my nose. After the medicos had a look at me and set my face straight, I had to place myself in front of my father so that he could properly detail to me what I had done wrong.

“He spoke of the usual things, how I didn’t care to practice, how I relied on the little talent that he would acknowledge, how my good start would be ruined, and how of my peers would climb the rungs of power ahead of me, eventually leaving me so far behind that my name would become an afterthought. I asked him then, standing in his court, looking down at the angelic figures of the family’s storied history carved into the wood, what was the point of power? Edwin was a hard worker, but he was a dullard, and he had no real future ahead of him. My older brother Cravid was already showing signs of inheriting a portion of my father’s endowment, but all he did was spend his time cavorting in taverns where men pretended not to recognize the duke’s son, only now he could lift kegs over his head to impress the locals. Why should he be gifted power so freely when everyone knew that he would never find a proper use for it?

“My father looked at me, his face as grave as I have ever seen it, and he revealed to me a vital truth of this world. There is no purpose to power. No one in this world requires an excuse or a reason to seek it out. As he often does, he quoted an ancient text from the Hillvari, that power is the confluence of force and movement. No one needs a reason to seek power, because power does not function on reason. Power is the ability for someone or something to manifest force, their will, and make others move. No reason is required, because everyone has a secret buried in their heart, a desire for the world to be just a bit different. That is what power allows, enabling one person or a group of people to shift the world, pushing it more towards how they think that it should be. From the lowest villein deciding that a rocky field would be better if it supported a crop of grain to the highest king issuing a decree and watching millions jump to action, everyone exercises what power they have to change the world.

“Then he made this point abundantly clear, poking me in the chest with his finger. Everyone, and I mean everyone, has that seed of pride inside of them, thinking that the world is just a bit tilted and that they have some inkling of how it can be righted.”

Jor’Mari has a bittersweet look in his eye as he reclines in his chair, sighing and looking down at his hand.

“That still does not explain why the guild would not intervene,” I say, looking him over. With proper clothes on, pink-dyed linen for his blouse and some black breeches, he is so different from the man that I first met. He looks smaller than I remember him, vulnerable. “How does allowing the children of nobility inside of their lands grant the guild more power? If anything, would it not diminish it?”

“I can’t be certain,” he says, looking up from his hand. “I do not know or understand much about the political game, but I know enough not to guess at goals or motives. Half of politics is hiding these things after all. It could be incompetence, but I have a difficult time believing that such a powerful force could be so incompetent. They showed us yesterday that they saw everything, they must have a reason for not interfering then, but I haven’t the faintest clue as to what that reason might be. Perhaps they gain from all of us going around and killing one another somehow, or maybe they are trying to stir blood-feuds between the nobility. The reason that it is a poor idea to guess at these things is because it is easy to invent a reason. That by itself is not so bad, but when you begin to believe and act on your own imaginings, you will inevitably misstep.”

“You are speaking to me quite a bit today,” I say. “Feeling chatty?”

“Maybe I am,” he says. “Is it so strange that I might want someone to speak with? I grow lonely at times, and you seem to share a similar…focus with me. I find that attractive.”

I snort, rolling my eyes.

“No, I am serious,” he says, leaning forward. “More than just the fact that we have been wronged in the same way, I see what is going on beneath the skin. When I met you in that cafe, you were just a local girl plucked out of obscurity. Arabella saw something in you, and I admit that I did not see it then. It has only been a short time since then and your mastery of your power has expanded faster than I have seen anyone else’s before. Well, other than myself of course. I know that does not happen simply by standing still or by lacking a particular level of ambition.”

I cannot help but laugh. “I do not feel ambitious,” I say. “I am simply fortunate in some very particular ways. I feel as if I have spent most of my time as a magician not taking anything seriously. Despite understanding how deadly the world is and knowing that as someone fortunate enough to have gained these powers I would need to hurl myself at that danger, I barely considered it. If Kendon and Coriander never betrayed me, I don’t know if I ever would have started moving forward.”

“Doesn’t that make it all the more impressive then?” Jor’Mari asks. “If you have only been dedicating yourself to accruing power for a short time, it is startling how well you have managed it. The both of us are still in the first rank, where gaining power is far easier, but you are catching up. The two of us have power and we have a shared way that we wish for the world to be, without those two in it. Are we not a perfect depiction of what my father said before?”

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“Didn’t he say power is without a reason?” I ask. “You just said that we share a reason.”

He waves off the comment. “Perhaps the distinction is still too nuanced for you to understand.”

I can’t help but share his smirk. The man can be awfully charming when he isn’t being a prick. “Is that what we want though, for the world to exist without Kendon or Coriander?”

“You aren’t getting cold feet on me now,” Jor’Mari says. “I was stabbed many times yesterday trying to do just that.”

“I didn’t go unscathed either,” I say.

His eyes roam over me, lingering a bit too long in certain places. “You could have fooled me.”

I shake my head. “I don’t know if I want to kill them. It feels a little…too simple.”

“They turned me into a murderer,” Jor’Mari says, his words dripping venom as he flexes his hand. The leather of the chair he sits on cries as his nails dig into it, ripping. “That bastard stabbed me in the back and drove me to kill someone in cold blood. He doesn’t deserve to live. The world will be better off without him.”

“Maybe things would be better without either of them running around, but I don’t really care about that,” I say, a little startled at my own words. They are true I realize. “That might be a bit selfish. It just doesn’t matter to me whether the world is a better place with them in it or not. I just want to make them suffer, to feel that same pain and fear that I felt a hundred times over. I want them to stew in that fear, I want them to crawl and scratch, trying to free themselves from it, but never being able to. I want them to wish that every day when they wake up that someone will come and put them out of their misery. Dead people don’t feel things like that.”

“Tits and honey, you are a viper,” Jor’Mari says. “What then do you propose to do? I still want to rip that bastard’s throat out, but I am not closed to other ideas. Though, I doubt that the guild will allow such blatant violence any longer. They do not seem the kind to make idle threats.”

“They said that they would allow violence as long as it was inside the bounds of the competition,” I point out. “I don’t doubt that there will be a point that excuse will be relevant. If it isn’t, we can at the least embarrass them and force them to fail this contest. I know that Kendon dreams of succeeding here, he told me as much before. If I could take at least that little from him then it would be a good step forward.”

“You really aren’t the forgiving kind,” Jor’Mari says.

“Not when someone tries to kill me,” I say. I pause, studying the man across from me. I know that at least two people in the room are eavesdropping on our conversation, but that is fine by me. They probably should know what the goals of their teammates are, and it isn’t as if we have much privacy. “Are you really just lonely and looking for someone to speak to?”

“Would you be so surprised if I said that I was?” he asks. “I like people; they are interesting. It has been torture stalking through the silent woods, keeping the companionship of bloodthirsty monsters. They severely lack in the ability to banter. Besides, it is much easier to speak to you now that I don’t have to worry about accidentally revealing the secret of endowment to you.”

My eyes narrow. “So, you knew that I didn’t know.”

“Of course, you are a human. In the empire, it is illegal to teach a human about these matters. The empire believes that your people are far better being a happy and ignorant workforce.” He holds up his hands when he looks up to see my face. “Don’t blame me; I certainly won’t try and defend the empire’s laws. They are backwards. Keeping the human populace ignorant of the world and how things work has only led to the slow decline of the empire over the past few centuries. It isn’t just the matter of endowment either. There is an entire wing of the royal service dedicated to keeping your people an ignorant and superstitious lot, suspicious of learning and bettering yourselves. One day, when the emperor dies, the armies of our neighbors will sweep in and start plucking up the land. That is what happens when you allow commerce and innovation to languish in the name of stability and safety.”

“So, everyone else knows about this power that the nobility keep, endowment. What those two said was true, and I have been kept in the dark for my whole life about something so fundamental.”

“I have only left the empire once before,” Jor’Mari says. “I cannot say one way or another as to whether the information is wide-spread, but I do know that it is a part of the legal doctrine to keep that information from the lower classes within the empire.”

“Why?”

“For the reason that I said before,” Jor’Mari says. “Power. The empire is afraid of your people, and they want to keep the power for themselves.”

“How could they possibly be afraid of a bunch of farmers. Does us knowing that the lords and ladies are soaking up the power of our souls to make themselves stronger instead of it being a natural product of their race change much? They are still mighty. What could they fear from a bunch of people with pitchforks and crafting hammers? The lowliest baron can still put down an entire legion of peasants by themselves.”

“Well, tell me, does knowing the truth change things for you now?” Jor’Mari asks.

I stop a moment, trying to look inward. “It does,” I say. “It is just a feeling though, like suddenly fairness has been stripped out of the world. I knew before that it was not fair that the true-blood elves should have so much more power than me, but there was a rightness about it. I had gotten it into my head from Sister Grace’s stories that we deserved to be lesser than them. After the human crusades, we are fortunate to be allowed to live on their lands and to tend their fields. But they don’t give us the land because they are gracious, do they. They give us the land, they allow us to have our small lives, because it makes them stronger to do so, and they won’t even let us know about it. I never agreed to that.”

He smirks. “You should know better than anyone, those without power don’t have the privilege to agree or disagree with the world.”

“I’m not powerless anymore,” I say.

“No,” he agrees. “No, you aren’t.”

I sigh, looking at the wall and the arch burned into it. I don’t have a good way to tell time in here. It might already be approaching the time when that door will open, but my gut tells me that we have a long ways to go still. “You are odd for being a lord,” I say, a part of me wondering how he will react.

“Well, that is because I am not,” he says, “Surely, even you understood that there are no non-elven lords in Gale. I don’t misunderstand, most bastards born in my circumstances spend their lives mucking out stables and ducking the lord’s lady wife. I was born luckier than most, my father, despite all of the pressure from his family, joined my name with that of Mari. I have mucked plenty of stables in my day, but at least I had a bed to sleep in. It was a good life.”

“Was?”

He pauses, his gaze still on the ceiling as he leans back in his seat. “Was,” he repeats. “I am a magician now, aren’t I? I was never going to go anywhere on that estate. If I am going to have any kind of name worth remembering, I will have to make it on my own. If I am going to make even the least bit of good come out of this life that I was given…there is so much to do.” I can see in his face that he is holding something back. He looks down at his hand again. “He died, and it happened with this hand. It becomes so easy to rip monsters apart with the barest thought; it should be harder, shouldn’t it?”

Something tells me that he isn’t thinking about the young lordling in the woods. Something Macille once told me long before when he warned me off of getting close to this man comes back to me. Out in front of the first dungeon, Macille told me that Jor’Mari had killed his brother. Just whose blood was he searching for on his clean alabaster hand I wonder.

“I remember a bit of it,” he says after a moment. “That is how I know you weren’t lying to me then. The entire scene is a blur, running through the woods, cringing from every sound. I remember a man and an awful snapping sound. When I think about it, the feeling of something wet between my fingers comes back to my mind. I know that I did it, that I killed that man. My heart whispers to me, telling me that I did so. I won’t ever forgive that bastard for that, for putting these sensations and emotions in my heart. They won’t ever disappear.” He stops, taking a breath as he looks at me.

“I am not like you Ms. Devardem, I do want to kill those two. They have already made a murderer out of me, and so when I think about that, I want it to be their faces that I see caught between my fingers, not the dead eyes of some unlucky bastard that happened to stumble upon me by chance when I was insensate.”

Warmth. I look down. His hand rests beneath my own, but I can’t recall reaching out to him. Pain, more than I understand, lurks in his eyes. His gaze flicks down to where our two hands meet, and the pain retreats, locked away once more in the far back of his thoughts as a smirk comes to his face. I join him, pulling away and looking at the dead fire in the hearth, a smile pulling at my own lips.

“If it makes it any better,” I say, “I believe that man was the worst kind of man. In the short time that I saw him, he captured a woman, changed her body into the size of a doll and said that he would add her to his collection. He doesn’t seem the kind that should be allowed to wander about, for everyone’s sake.”

“I thought you said that you didn’t care about what was good for the world,” he replies.

“Sometimes I might,” I say. “Does that help any?”

He chuckles. “A little bit actually. It doesn’t make me hate those two any less.”

“No,” I say. “We will need to make sure we reach the top ahead of them. To do that, we are going to need to win three of these Stoneball matches.” The note that Jess shared with me before I slept said as much. Each group will have to participate in three matches of the game against other teams, and each loss in the game carries a five hour penalty for heading up to the next floor. “You’re a pompous aristocrat aren’t you; do you have any insight for me.”

The smirk on the man’s face becomes just a bit more sincere as he leans forward. “Ms. Devardem, did you just ask a nobleman to explain the rules of a sports game to you? Perhaps you do not know this, given your muddy origins, but allow me to demonstrate how dangerous a thing that is.”

Demonstrate he does. I sit in the chair for the next two hours, listening to Jor’Mari explain the rules and complexities of the game to me, but also of his great achievements in his years of playing it. All the while, I catch glances from Jess and Clarice, each hiding a smile behind their hands as they watch me take in the impromptu lecture. I don’t mind it though, there is a sincerity in Jor’Mari’s explanation, a genuine glee in how animated he becomes trying to make certain I understand the finer details. It is a far better way to spend the day than polishing grimy gear.