Turn 7 of 7

Sarkady's expression shifts. The recognition that crossed her face when you asked the question settles into something quieter — not triumph but the grim satisfaction of a surgeon locating the shrapnel. She steps back to the proper distance, and for a moment she is just a woman in a grey jacket with chalk on her boots, standing in the afternoon light of a court that smells like dust and old iron.

"Rendel told me," she says. "Not directly. He told my advocate, who told me, in the way that men like Rendel tell things — sideways, deniable, with enough distance that it could never be traced back. He said the best fencer in Ceniza would never show it, and he said it like a man describing the weather." She pauses.

"I thought he was boasting about you. It took me two years to understand he was warning me."

The word sits between you like a blade laid flat on the ground. Warning. You look up at the gallery, at the dark shape of Rendel standing by the bench with his hand still in his pocket, and the architecture of six years becomes visible all at once, the way a building becomes visible when the fog lifts — not a building but a cage, and you the animal inside it, and Rendel the man with the key who has never once asked to be let in because he already knows what you would do if you got out. He sent Sarkady. He sent someone who would not accept the loss, who would force the question, who would stand on the strip and refuse to let the pattern hold. He is not afraid of your winning or your losing. He is afraid of you staying still. The forty-two bouts were not your secret to keep — they were his, and he has been waiting for someone to pry them open, and Sarkady is the pry bar.

You reach for your blade. It is still in your hand, where it has been the whole time, and the grip is warm with your sweat and the weight of it is the weight it has always been. You look at Sarkady and you see that she understands — that she understood before she walked onto this strip, that the bet was never about making you win. It was about making you choose. You raise the sabre. Not a salute. An invitation. The referee looks up from his notes. Tomas, at the armoury table, goes very still.

"En garde," you say, and the word comes out in your own voice for the first time in six years.