Turn 5 of 7

Tell Tomas to request a recess from the referee

You turn to Tomas. His hand is still on your shoulder, and you can feel the question in his grip before he speaks it.

"Tomas," you say. "Request a recess. Tell the referee we need ten minutes."

He blinks. You can feel the hesitation in his fingers — the instinct to ask why warring with the training that says a second obeys. Training wins. He squeezes once, a gesture that is half reassurance and half plea, and then he is moving past you toward the referee with the careful, upright walk of a young man trying to look like he belongs on the strip. You watch him go. He speaks to the referee in a low voice, and the referee's face cycles through confusion, irritation, and something that might be relief. A recess means he does not have to decide what to do about Sarkady's refusal. A recess means someone else will sort this out.

Sarkady watches Tomas go, and then she watches you. She has not lowered her blade. She is standing on the strip with the posture of a woman who will not be moved by protocol or recess or the slow machinery of the Courts, and her eyes are doing the work that her mouth is not. She is reading you. She is reading the way you sent your second instead of speaking to the referee yourself, the way your weight has settled back onto your heels, the way you are still standing behind the rear chalk line as though the line is a border you cannot uncross. She tilts her head a fraction to the left.

"You're buying time," she says. "Not for yourself. For him." Her chin lifts toward the gallery, toward Rendel, and the motion is small enough that only someone standing where you are standing would catch it.

"That tells me more than you think it does, Vaszary."

In the gallery, Rendel has not moved. His hand is still in his pocket, his expression still unreadable, but you know him well enough to see the tension in his jaw, the slight forward lean of a man who was sitting and is now standing and has not yet decided whether standing was a mistake. He is watching you. He is watching Sarkady. He is watching the referee wave for the recess clerk, and somewhere behind his stillness there is a calculation happening — the kind of calculation that Advocate Rendel makes when a case is about to turn on something he did not anticipate. The clerk approaches the strip with the recess ledger. The gallery is murmuring. And Sarkady is still on the line, blade up, refusing to step back, refusing to let you disappear into ten minutes of corridor and quiet.

"I'll take the recess," she says, "but I want you to know something." She steps closer, half a pace, close enough that you can smell the chalk and sweat on her jacket.

"I didn't bet money. I bet a name. Someone very important to me told me that you were the best fencer in Ceniza and that you would never show it, and I bet them that I could make you show it." Her blade drops another inch.

"I haven't lost yet, Vaszary. Neither have you. Not really."