Cadence shrugged his weapon into his hand, whirled it around once for good measure, and slapped it down into the other.

  He charged.

  Dalliance hadn't seen him run this fast before; it was a deceptive speed, looking slow because of his height.

  The thin smile on the wizard's face met his charge with a lightning bolt, which blazed too bright for Dalliance to even track where it went, so bright that it whitened his vision and left him blinking purple and green.

  Dalliance blinked furiously through watering eyes. On the field, he heard his Da shout, "Coward!"

  When his eyes cleared, he could only see Cadence.

  He heard a low murmuring in his ears from the spectators; the villagers didn't approve of invisibility. Dalliance wondered if they thought Parsimony should have just stood still and allowed himself to be impaled.

  For his part, Cadence looked unhurt and angry, slashing his glaive around in wild circles where one might expect a backstabbing opponent to approach. Clearly, he'd fought invisible opponents before, and just as clearly, they'd attacked him directly when he had.

  The ground began to shake.

  Rents ripped themselves through grassy loam and the dark soil beneath, racing across the green. Chasms yawned. Blocks of stone rose from the ground, and pits opened up, the whole of it vibrating with the shock of friction as rock ground against rock.

  The air smelled foul, like minerals and smoke.

  Jasmine began to cough.

  Great chunks of bladed stone tore their way through the soil and slung themselves at Cadence Rather, who for his part laughed uproariously and began to shatter them. Each strike sent great arcing red sparks and clove stones in two, leaving hanging smoke in the air and that acrid, mineral scent of violence and burnt earth.

  Lightning played across the field from a seemingly empty quarter, slamming into the form of Cadence Rather and arcing to his glaive, which he dropped after a sustained instant.

  "If that's how we're playing it," he said, and picked up a stone, hurling it with the speed and accuracy Dalliance had observed from the Games night. It flew toward the empty air, but the stone slowed, then stopped in mid-air, midway between them, and fell to the grass with a solid thunk.

  The ground beneath Cadence's feet gave way into a morass, and he sank to his waist in an instant.

  "You're spineless," he said. "Using cheap tricks because you're not strong enough to face me man-to-man."

  A shaped dart of stone launched itself like a fish breaching the water into the side of his head, shattering but leaving a trail of blood running down the side of his face.

  A crimson streak. Dalliance had never seen him bleed before.

  Jasmine made a small sound of discomfort. Dalliance didn't glance at her, but the guilt was just that much worse.

  The sight sent a nauseating jolt through his stomach, a hot, coiling shame. It was one thing to orchestrate an execution in the abstract, to set the pieces on the board. It was another to see the physical reality of it: his father's blood, bright and shocking against his skin. This wasn't a monster from a story. This was his Da, and Dalliance had just set a man's course towards hurting him. For a sickening moment, he wanted it to stop. He wanted to call it all off, to undo the letter, to take back yesterday. The feeling was an intense wave of regret, a child's panic at having broken something irreplaceable.

  He knew that.

  But what was done was done.

  Another three missiles jumped out of the soil, this time from Cadence's back, rebounding off his helmet, which itself flew in a glittering arc. Blood ran freely down the side of his face.

  Cadence stooped to reclaim his helmet, but the earth collapsed beneath it, drawing it away.

  "You think you're so clever," Cadence snarled.

  Dalliance noticed that Pleasant had yet to say a word. Whatever he might think about the man, he wasn't grandstanding. Dalliance wondered what the conversation they would inevitably have after this would be like. Dalliance wondered who he would be having the conversation with.

  Lightning blazed out again, this time a more subdued hue, purplish and lancing from a spot in mid-air fifty feet above the ground. The villagers were starting to sound really unhappy now. This wasn't a real fight.

  This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

  "Point of order!" said the duel's overseer. "Boots on the ground, Pleasant, or forfeit!"

  Parsimony must have descended. Dalliance couldn't see it happen, but the arbiter said nothing more, nodding curtly and stepping back to the edge of the Green.

  Once on the ground, Cadence threw a scattering of gravel in a wide arc, watching for where it might strike something invisible. The pebbles clattered across stone and disturbed earth, and then a handful stopped, suspended for a heartbeat before tumbling down. There. Cadence rushed the area, cleaving through the space with his glaive in brutal, sweeping arcs. An upthrust cliff of rock caught a blow that would have struck flesh, but the black blade cleaved through the stone, shattering it into shards on the way with a violent retort and a cloud of black smoke, blood splattered on the grass from an invisible source.

  "I'd yield," Parsimony said conversationally, as if that hadn't happened, his voice coming from somewhere near the blood, "but I suspect you'd end up killing me anyway. Always knew it might lead us here."

  Cadence was shouting. Parsimony was using a spell to amplify his voice. Dalliance was sure of it.

  Probably an air spell?

  Cadence leaped forward to slash again, and lightning struck his weapon, again. This time he dropped it and kicked it forward into the area where it skittered across the ground and struck something with a meaty thud. Parsimony fell back, gesturing wildly. Dalliance noticed he didn't seem to need to speak to cast, at all.

  The ground fell away before Cadence, a sinkhole thirty feet deep opening beneath him. He gouged handholds from the stone walls to climb his way back up to the top. Parsimony slammed the walls shut, drawing a pained gasp from Cadence, but an opposing wall gave him purchase to force his way to the surface again, and he erupted in a shower of dirt and gravel.

  His glaive was nowhere to be seen.

  "If blood is what you want," Parsimony said with effort, his voice strained, "then FINE."

  The earth began to churn, giant stone blades breaking forth like churning mixers, soil flying. The green was never going to heal from this.

  The spell was clearly taking all of Parsimony's focus, the mage visible now, atop a spire of protruding stone, the massive stone blades pursuing his quarry far below him.

  Cadence was struck by one, while another came up in a shearing motion from beneath like a giant pair of scissors. His arm was bleeding profusely now, nearly severed but reclaimed at the last second. His eyes were wild.

  He pulled a handful of darts from his quiver and hurled them, the metallic missiles unaffected by the magic of Parsimony Pleasant, who only managed to avoid one of them. The others struck, and he fell, scraping himself down the side of his own stone spire. Cadence was in hot pursuit, but ran into another collapse, this one a thin shell of earth over a chasm, unannounced. Parsimony had been moving things as he went.

  Cadence was too strong for that. He caught one hand on the side, muscled up, and hurled a chunk of stone at the unprepared wizard, striking him in the chest and knocking him off his feet, even as the ground sprouted grasping hands of stone to hold him back.

  Parsimony is going to die, Dalliance thought. Oh no.

  The realization crashed through him in layers. He's going to win. The immediate reality. He's bleeding. He's hurt. But he's winning. The horror at his father's resilience. I did this. I brought Pleasant here. I'm getting him killed.

  The guilt was followed closely by dread: Cadence would figure it out. The rest of the family had.

  The realization settled over Dalliance like ice water. Parsimony was going to lose.

  Stress poured through his body, thickening his saliva and churning in his stomach. His Da was going to win. Bleeding, hurt, but winning. And when he did—when Pleasant lay dead in the churned earth—Cadence would come seeking.

  Who'd arranged the duel? Who'd set this all in motion?

  He'll know, Dalliance thought, his breath catching. He'll know I did this to him. And then—

  The image flashed unbidden: his father's face, that same expression of rage, but turned on him. Just the two of them, and his father's hands, and no one to stop it. All I did was show the world that he's strong, again.

  I have to do something.

  Cadence began to stalk forward, a titan of battered flesh and unstoppable will. Each step was heavy, deliberate. Blood dripped from the gash on his temple, tracing a path through the grime on his cheek. His right arm, mauled by the shearing stone, hung at a slightly unnatural angle, the torn muscle weeping a steady, spattering trail onto the ruined earth.

  Parsimony climbed to his feet, swaying. He was a scarecrow of a man, his orange robes torn and filthy, his face pale with shock and exhaustion. He held up a hand, a gesture that was half warding, half surrender.

  Across the field, Brandish took a step forward, his mouth opening, his hand rising to call a halt.

  No. The word screamed through Dalliance's mind. Not a draw. Not a surrender. He'll still be alive!

  If Cadence Rather walked off this field alive, Dalliance was as good as dead.

  Parsimony had a lot of irons in the fire. Dalliance could follow several possibilities, whirling through the mage's mind and visible via the ever-shifting future of the field: ghostly hillocks rising and falling, ghostly missiles flickering through the air.

  Mostly, Parsimony was going to die.

  Cadence needed a distraction.

  "Why won't you die?" Dalliance whispered, the venomous sentiment he'd replayed through his mind for nights leaking into the words, and directly to his Da's ears. More vicious than he'd meant, or known he could be.

  His father's eyes, which had been fixed on the wizard, whipped around, wide and disbelieving. They found Dalliance across the field instantly, his face, already flushed with exertion, turned a deep, apoplectic red in dawning realization of the betrayal. His lips peeled back from his teeth in a silent snarl.

  The soil exploded behind him, and he jumped forward away from it, but even as his eyes left Dalliance's, a stony arm breached through the churned earth, wielding his own black-bladed glaive. The weapon sang through the air in a whistling arc and struck him in the back of the neck, severing his head.

  Dalliance flinched away at the wet, heavy CHUNK, a butcher's sound of cleaving through thick bone and dense gristle. Cadence's head, its face locked in that final expression of fury, landed in the churned earth and stuck in place, glaring at the sky.

  The horn blew a mournful note. The fight was over.

  "Oh no, Dalliance," said Jasmine. His face was frozen. He knew that, but didn't know what to do about it.

  His family was on their feet, some running onto the field already.

  His mother was staring at him in white-faced horror.

  And as he glanced back to the wizard, their eyes met too, in mutual, damning recognition.