My defeat hug, as I immediately dub it, turns out to be hilariously awkward. Easy and I had clasped forearms before she pulled me into it, both of us dizzy with the release of tension from our song-battle and laughing in joy. As a result, my right arm and her left arm are between us, shoved up between our torsos and twisted uncomfortably.
It’s a nice moment anyway. She’s tall, not quite Amber’s height but still most of a decimeter above mine, with arms and shoulders that speak to her combat training. Her strength makes for an inescapable embrace despite the arms in the way, and even with the size difference my head rests comfortably on her shoulder. We stand there like that for a long moment, until the laughter we can feel shaking each other’s body gentles into chuckles and then fades entirely, and then her shoulders relax and I step just enough away from her to make easy eye contact.
“Well won, Ranger.”
“Eh.” She grins at me, a grin with a twist of something, maybe embarrassment. “There’s rot in my shafts for sure, I stumbled more’n once and we didn’t even get out of the warmup rounds.”
“Warmup rounds?” I raise an eyebrow at her.
“Don’t make a duel of songs with a Bard around these parts, is the advice I’ll give. This, though? I’m an amateur, but this was fun, a good challenge. Well sung, Magelord.”
“Huh.” I chew on that mentally as the onlookers gather around Easy to congratulate her on her win and say whatever else needs saying. It makes a certain amount of sense; if someone’s been stuck in the Temple for five hundred years, they’ll have a repertoire that makes what we did look easy.
Warmup rounds. I chuckle, and head for the exit. Mentally, I add attend a Bardic performance to my list of things that I’ll regret not having had the opportunity to do, or not taking the opportunity to do. Realistically, there won’t be time to do more than attend whatever ceremonies or performances are part of the Tournament; we’ll fight, we’ll eat dinner, and after that… well, after that, I’ll either go or not go to whatever Lily has planned for me, whatever she invited me to.
Ridiculous. I shake my head, smiling at my thoughts. With both Zidanya and Amber pushing me to go, and with the astonishing degree to which Lily affects me anytime she wants to, I don’t see much chance that I won’t take her offer.
“You were defeated.”
“I suppose I was.” My reply comes automatically, but then I blink a few times as I step through the exit. “How did you—oh, if I’d won I’d probably be getting mobbed by the panel, and Easy would have left the room before me. Yours done so fast you could come find my room?”
Sara takes a long moment to answer. I let go of the door in the meantime and watch it slide closed behind me, eyeing the smooth, off-white slab of stone with both mundane vision and my Visor’s assistive sensorium; the door closes with some sort of dampening effect, enough that the edge touches the wall with nothing more than a whisper, but I can’t see any active effects. It could be mechanical, but either way, it’s probably set inside the stone and somehow insulated.
“I was maneuvered into a contest which included physical endurance in its factors.” Sara’s voice is level, but her shoulders are hunched… defensively, maybe? “It was swifter than yours.”
“Eh, that’s fine.” I itch to reach out to her, to clap her on the shoulder or hug her, but she’s been clear about her preferences on that score. I settle for a toss, a wrist-flick over the shoulder with fingers in a pinch, but then I realize that Sara has no idea what that means. I cough awkwardly and shrug, instead. “We’re okay. We could go oh-for-four in this and I’d still be confident about our chances in the upcoming fight. And we won’t.”
“I cannot imagine,” she says dryly, “that Zidanya will be defeated.”
“They might underestimate Amber, too.” I smile with a totally undignified amount of fondness. “But it doesn’t matter. What’s next?”
“Lunch. I am given to understand the corridors of this demesne will guide us.”
“Well then.” I wave vaguely in one direction of the corridor. “Let’s walk, I guess?”
It’s a mostly silent walk, Sara looking contemplative anytime I glance over at her. The corridor turns a couple of times, angled intersections in more of that dull off-white stone. There’s always an obvious path, but it’s not obvious to me why it’s obvious; magic, obviously, but while the spell effects themselves are pretty obvious and I can break them down to see how they’re acting on me, I can’t see anything about what’s generating them or where they’re coming from.
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It’s a nice walk, giving me time to get my head back together after the intensity of the song-duel. There’s the usual, almost comfortable stream of what ifs, what if I’d gone for this other brilliant line, what if I’d come up with the rhyme a little bit sooner, but I’m a dab hand at regrets and letting them flow past me. A hundred endings means a hundred opportunities to revisit every fight, every bitter word, every failing; the fact that those were fundamentally irrelevant didn’t stop me, probably doesn’t stop anyone, but at least it was good practice, and I’m ready to smile genuinely again once we find ourselves at our luncheon.
“Well, this is unexpected.”
My voice is a murmur, but it’s enough for Sara to catch, and she snorts. We’ve both stopped at the entrance to the long hall, with its single long, curving table that doubles back on itself again and again. The table—it’s a single piece of wood, a dark brown hardwood only a few shades short of deserving the word black, supported by arching feet of light gray bone—is about two-thirds full, five sets of four place settings in what are obviously deliberate bunches, a layout that’s somehow significant even if that significance escapes me for the moment.
The significance of there being exactly twenty-one seats does not escape me, especially with the one odd seat out being separated from all the others. Placed, in fact, where everyone will be able to see… well, Lady Sheid, presumably.
“I presume we are to be… friendly, sir.”
I turn to grin at Sara. “I’m not sure whether it’s funnier that you say that like it might be a question, or that you say that like it’s totally not a question.” Something like the ghost of a smile passes her face, and I grin wider. “Yeah. Let’s make friends.”
We drift apart as we each walk to where the magical tugging sense of need-to-move is pulling us. Zidanya’s already seated at the table, chatting amicably with Raoul, whom she presumably dispatched in good enough time that she beat me here, but otherwise the table, mostly empty, lacks anyone I recognize. Of the four seats in the cluster I’m being drawn to, there’s three empty and one already filled; I have to pull up the Visor to figure out who the white-haired man I’m sitting across is. Diagonally across, but it still behooves me to know who… Eyes Wide Open is, of team Flight?
Well, that name suits the whitely-glowing sockets without any discernible eyes in them, but it sure is a disturbing look.
“Adam Leviath—Levi, Adam Levi James,” I say by way of introduction, stumbling over myself.
“Throughout the ages,” the man across me intones, “I have possessed many names of power. But in this place, in this time, you may call me…Pat.” He leans forward, glancing left and right, then lowers his voice to a murmur. “It is part of the word for open, you see.”
“I… part of the word for open, huh.” I eyed him dubiously. “Alright, Pat. So, what’s your passion?”
“My… passion.” Pat seemed nonplussed at my non-reaction to his dramatics, and looks at me like he’s trying to figure something out. I just outwait him, the very personification of calm patience. “Knowledge,” he says finally. “It is a well that never runs empty. The totality of the knowledge we garb ourselves with is the only thing that keeps this beacon in the darkness shining, but that is a paltry tithe of the true reward. Everything that is, can be known.”
“Not in it for the power of it, you just want to understand everything.” His eyes narrow, the blazing whiteness that fills the sockets sort of leaking to the sides in a narrow trickle that dissipates into the air, and I smile at him as genuinely as I can manage. “I respect that.”
He gives it a beat, as if he’s expecting me to say something else, and then his eyes un-narrow and stop leaking. “Hm.” For a moment, it seems like he’s going to leave it at that, but he speaks again, abruptly, like it’s being pulled out of him. “And yourself? What is your passion?”
“I love people,” I say slowly, “but if I had to pick a singular passion, there’s no contest. It’s the spark that ignites comprehension, the piece that completes the puzzle. It’s the leap from that which is known to that which is learned.”
“The moment of understanding.”
“The big a-ha.”
We nod at each other, a sort of self-assured, rod-up-our-asses nod. I can’t help but smirk about it all, and he looks like he’s going to say something about that, but then there’s a scrape as one of the gray-and-brown chairs is pulled back and Easy sits down across from me. She’s all smiles, but she’s fidgeting, which she hadn’t been earlier, fingers tapping at the surface of the table and the plates, stark white ceramic softened only by a band of bronze three centimeters in from the edge.
There’s another scrape and a low grunt as Knives joins us. He pulls his chair in, nodding first to me and then to the other two, and a quiet chime captures our attention as Lady Sheid commands our attention.
Somewhat literally, which is always interesting to experience.
“How pleasant it is, for all of us to be gathered here together.” Her voice is calm, unstrained, but it carries through the room as though amplified. “I won’t bore you all with a speech. You’re all hungry; some of you are ravenous.
“You break bread now with each other, whom you may soon fight. Remember both, however the day passes.”
With a wave of her hand, glyphs—glyphs that I recognize, transportation glyphs—flare to life, and our plates and bowls are filled with food. Taking my cue from the others at the table, I tear a hunk of bread off of the small loaf that sits behind my plate, dip it into the thick soup, and lend myself to the serious business of savoring.