“—Daivad.”
He’d thought eight years away from this fucking mountain, from those enormous walls and iron gates and the horrors they hid behind them, would have loosened Broken Earth’s grip on him. But one look at the Bear’s skull, mouth gaping over the main gates, and everything came back. Everything Daivad had never wanted.
He felt the shining armor Aran had crafted for him cinched too tight around his torso, felt the tight shoulders and high neck of all the dress uniforms she liked to parade him around in. He felt the collar clamping around his neck, felt his magic die.
“Ay! Asshole!” The kid’s voice yanked him back to the present.
“What?” he grumbled.
“Did we come all this way just to stare at this place?” she asked from atop Maxea’s back. She’d certainly grown more comfortable up there—Daivad wondered if she just liked being tall for once.
“Get down,” was his answer. “We can’t bring Max any closer.”
“What?”
“Everyone knows to name her Mine, most of all the people of Broken Earth.” Aran had made sure of that. She’d stuck him and Maxea at the front of every parade she could throw during his army days. The Night Prince astride his big black Wolf.
“But—it’s dark. There’s monsters.”
“You’re the one who demanded to come, kid.”
Pait set her jaw, glaring down at him (for once). “Quit naming me Kid.”
“Quit acting like one.”
With a huff, she kicked her leg up and slid off Max. “Just ‘cause you give no shit for self-preservation doesn’t name the idea Childish.”
The walk to the foot of the mountain should have been an easy one—the forest had long been tamed and the ground here was flat. But Daivad’s every step grew heavier, and an unpleasant prickling sensation wrapped around his neck.
Those walls. As they loomed closer, Daivad felt sure they were bigger than the last time he’d seen them. Wildly, he imagined Aran, with that mad look she got on her face when anyone defied her, fevered skin and popping eyes, marching out herself to sink her magic into these walls and raise them even higher.
But, Daivad assured himself as he stared up, up, up at the top of the outermost wall, not even Aran could pull that off … could she?
“Eugh.” Pait yanked her cloak up to cover her nose. “Mothers above and below, give a girl some fucking warning next time.”
“You wanted to come.”
“If I’d known you’d be ripping ass like this I’d have wanted otherwise!”
He rolled his eyes. “It’s not me.”
“Sweet sh—” Pait gagged. “Mother Dark, I can’t even say it.”
Daivad just continued to the edge of a nearby ravine and pointed at the green-brown sewage that bubbled along at the bottom and repeated, “Not me.”
Cloak still pressed to her face and brown eyes watering, Pait gave a muffled, “We’re not.”
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“You wanted to come.”
~*~*~
Aside from the smell, the walk through the sewer wasn’t too bad. Sure, there were little nightbeasts the size of large house cats prowling around looking for rats to snack on, but they were easy to scare off, or else kick into the sewage if they were a bit too brave. The glowstones and raised walkways had been put in when the sewers were first built by Thorne I, and he’d cut them well enough that they still held—even if the runes needed a bit of reworking.
Pait found the whole thing much more stressful than he did. She screamed at every beast, kept gagging loudly, and kept an iron grip on his cloak the whole time.
It was odd that these tunnels didn’t bother Daivad the way any other tunnels, any other close quarters would. He supposed it was because these tunnels and the grates in each of the city’s walls had never represented confinement to him—just the opposite. They had always been his exit. His freedom.
The sewers were exactly the same as he remembered. But the rest of the city wasn’t. That realization sunk in the moment he was back above ground. They came up in an area of the outer circle that had always been mostly deserted when Daivad had been there in years past, but now was packed with what he initially thought were corpses lining the streets and shambling around in rags—their heartbeats and shallow breathing were about the only things that differentiated them from the dead.
This had always been the state of the outer circle, but there had never been so many before.
“Ah,” Pait muttered beside him with mock-nostalgia, “reminds me of home.”
Daivad tugged his hood lower over his face and stepped into the street. It smelled about as good as the sewer had. Beggars who were extending hands to every passing body quickly shrunk away when he passed. He frowned. Why was it always like this? Why was he always different?
“Gotta say,” Pait said. “The image my mind always painted when I heard the name ‘Broken Earth’ wasn’t one to match the poorest streets in Luvatha.”
“Mm. The queen’s grip on her people is so tight that even their minds get warped beneath her fingers, hundreds of miles away.”
After a beat, Pait asked, “Are those the types of thoughts your little brain conjured up while it was soaking in all those teenage hormones thirty years ago? Did you spend your days skulking around Broken Earth writing angsty little poems about Queen Arantxa?”
“I know you aren’t talking shit to me about teenage hormones,” he growled. “Not the girl whose mood shifts with every gust of wind. And I was a teenager ten years ago, not thirty.”
“Can’t help but notice the one thing you didn’t deny was the part about the skulking and the poems.”
“I didn’t.”
“Didn’t deny it, I know.”
“Mother fucking Light,” he grumbled to himself. “...Worse than Tobei.”
He could hear the smirk in her words. “Can you name even one place in this city that you like? Or don’t hate? Is it where we’re going?”
Daivad considered that for a moment, if there was somewhere in this city that didn’t stink of the Earthbreakers, didn’t make his skin itch or his stomach sink. He thought about saying those sewers—and upon imagining her response immediately thought better of it. He’d never explored the graveyard much when he was here—it was too quiet and unsettling. He always felt eyes on him. Dead eyes.
“No.”
“What about the Arena? I’ve heard it’s twice the size of Luvatha’s.”
“You think I hold fond memories of a place where people are killed for entertainment?”
“Kinda, yeah.”
He shot her a look, but could only see the top of her hood.
Like she could feel the glare anyway, she shrugged and said, “You like violence more than anyone I’ve ever met, and I’ve met many a violent man. Well, no—that shark guy, he was worse than you.”
A hot, sick bile roiled in his stomach and anger lit him up to burn it away. Daivad was about to snap at her—he was nothing like them. Nothing like the nobles who sat in their box above the screaming crowd to watch beasts—man and monster alike—dance a bloody dance for them. He never wanted anyone to fight for him, to die for his pleasure, so he could feel powerful from his safe little box.
And he was certainly not like those down in the stained sand, not the scared, powerless victims whose guts were laid bare for a cheering crowd, or worse, the gladiator pawns who thought their flashy helmets would make the crowd forget the marks on their arms. He was nothing like any of them.
Was he?
With that bile crawling up his throat, Daivad looked up, toward—the Arena.