Bloodchild (21 page)

Her eyes had been trailing through
the crowd, searching, and he knew what she’d been looking for when they stopped
on him. Her expression remained the same, somewhere between stern and serene,
but her eyes betrayed her, at least to Bradan.

He could read all her love for him
in them, and how much she’d missed him. He wished they could have shared a
bond, too, so he could have let her know the depth of his feelings for her. As
it was, all he could so was smile at her, raise a hand to press to his own
heart, and hope it would be enough.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Duel

Vivien had learned the ceremonial
words that opened a duel, and she had practiced them both by herself and with
Aedan giving the opponent’s traditional responses. She knew them as well as she
knew the pledge of allegiance or the lyrics to her favorite songs. As she
stepped closer to the dais, however, with Aedan and Olric on either side of
her, everything she had to say, everything she had to do, fled her mind.

Brad was there.

He stood ahead of her, a little to
the side next to the dais. He was dressed in black, although without the
QuickSilver symbol over his heart—nor any other symbol, she was relieved to
see. He carried no weapons but looked tense. Their eyes met across the room,
and in that instant the rest of the world disappeared. All the people who had
come to witness the duel, Rhuinn and his guards, even Vivien’s guards, none of
them existed anymore, only Vivien and Brad.

She would have given anything to
be able to run to him, wrap her arms around him, and have him wrap his around
her. Anything for a word or a kiss. But even as her universe narrowed down to
him, she knew she couldn’t allow herself to forget why she was here. She’d
worked too hard to give up now—even for Brad.

Besides, he was one of the reasons
why she had challenged Rhuinn in the first place. This duel was for Foh’Ran’s
future, true, but it was also a tribute to Brad’s human life, taken from him on
Rhuinn’s orders.

And so, rather than running to him
as she so wanted, all Vivien did was offer him a tiny smile. He returned it at
once, and warmth bloomed in her heart. She’d been so afraid that his decision
to remain with Ciara meant more than his desire to learn from her, but it was
the same expression on his face when he looked at her as always. They might be
apart, that expression said, but they were still together. She could do this,
she told herself. She could beat Rhuinn.

She
had
to beat him. The
alternative was unthinkable.

Focusing on her task again, she
walked through the room, aware that every eye was on her. She’d dressed in
black pants and boots again, because fighting while wearing a floor-length
dress would have been asking for trouble, but at Aedan’s suggestion she had
made some concession to Foh’Ran’s fashion with an emerald blouse embroidered in
silver along the arms and collar; something else from her mother’s closet that
Loree had tailored to fit her, and while she hated to be wearing something
Loree had touched, Aedan had made a point she couldn’t ignore. She’d also found
a cape that matched the blouse, the lush exterior dark green and the lining a
gleaming silver. She felt silly wearing the garment, but Aedan had assured her
it helped make her look the part.

“Defeating Rhuinn in the duels
will only be the first step,” he’d said. “If the high families see you as an
usurper from the Otherworld, they won’t accept your rule. The last thing
Foh’Ran needs is a war for the throne. The last one gave us Rhuinn for a
leader. There are people who would be worse than him on the throne only waiting
for their chance to seize it.”

Which was well and good, but it
did bring up the same old question to Vivien’s mind: what if
she
wasn’t
a better ruler than Rhuinn in the end?

But one thing at a time. First,
she had two or three duels to go through—and win. And before the first duel
could start, she had thirty-one words to deliver exactly right.

Like the last time she’d been
there, she walked up to the dais and stopped in the same place. At her feet,
the metal of the knife that had taken Brad’s life gleamed, melted by her
channeling and shaped by Rhuinn’s.

Perfect silence had fallen on the
ballroom, and everyone’s attention was on her. She glanced at Brad again, then
to her right at Aedan; both offered her an encouraging smile. Taking a deep breath,
Vivien raised her gaze toward the dais, and the man sprawled on the throne.
With a glass in one nonchalant hand and a slight smirk upon his lips, he
watched her as though she were something amusing but of no consequence. She
would soon do her best to prove him otherwise. It was time to start.

“I am Vivien Te Celden,” she
began. “I have come for our first duel, for the Quickening and by the
Quickening, for all quarrels should have a chance to be solved without
bloodshed.”

She’d scoffed the first time she’d
read those words, because one way or the other, this ‘quarrel’ would end with
blood, there was no way around it. How the duels and their rituals had grown
and evolved through time would have been something that, as a student, she’d
have enjoyed researching. Somehow, history didn’t seem so appealing when she
was caught in the middle of it.

Rhuinn set down his glass and
stood, each movement unhurried and showing his awareness that he now had the
attention of every single person present. He approached the edge of the dais
and channeled so that every word he pronounced was magnified as he gave the
appropriate answer. Vivien heard him, but the words made little sense and she
suddenly worried that she should have made her voice louder, too. Had she
sounded weak or—worse—afraid? Had that been her first mistake?

On the dais, Rhuinn had finished
talking. He shrugged out of the ornate coat he wore, holding it to the side
without taking his eyes off Vivien until a maid hurried to take it from him.
Rather than taking the few steps down the dais, he jumped off, his boots
smacking the stone floor noisily.

Vivien’s heartbeat accelerated,
and her fingers felt numb when she reached for the fastening of her cape. Aedan
stepped forward to take it from her and caught her gaze. He didn’t say a word,
not when they were the center of attention and even a whisper was sure to be
overheard, but the look in his eyes was easy enough to interpret. He had faith
in her and believed she could do this.

All she had to do now was prove
him right.

As Aedan and Olric retreated to
the side to stand with the onlookers, Vivien took a few steps back, putting
some distance between herself and Rhuinn. Seizing the Quickening took only a
second. The world turned gray around Vivien, except for the colors swirling
around Rhuinn. He was already channeling and, from what she could see, had
woven some sort of armor around himself.

She thought of doing the same, but
rejected the idea. He couldn’t draw blood from her, so armor was overkill.
Actually, she suspected the armor wasn’t so much a defense against her in this
particular situation as it was an habit of his. With so many people unhappy
with his rule, he might have grown used to protecting himself from unexpected
attacks.

A few seconds passed as they stood
face to face on the ballroom floor, both of them channeling yet neither
attacking yet. Vivien had already decided what she would do first; why was she
waiting? It wasn’t as though a buzzer or judge would signal the beginning of
the duel, the way they had in fencing.

Focusing the Quickening she
wielded, she formed an icy wave of air that she unfurled over Rhuinn. In a duel
where drawing blood was losing, mental strength would be the key between
victory and defeat. She wouldn’t win by causing Rhuinn a little discomfort, but
it would be one small chip in his armor.

Or it would have been if the cold
had touched him. He didn’t seem to even notice the arctic cold she had
conjured, though he must have known what she’d done as he sent in return a wave
of searing heat. It wasn’t enough to burn her, but she made a mistake by trying
to shield herself behind her own hands. While she was distracted, Rhuinn
channeled a large amount of Quickening. In a few seconds, he built up walls
around and above them, enclosing the two of them in a box that couldn’t have
been more than thirty feet long and maybe twenty feet wide.

The walls were translucent, and
she could still see well enough through them to identify a few familiar shapes.
Aedan, Olric, Brad, even Deltrea and his mother stood out in the crowd that had
moved forward all at once, getting closer to the box. She could even see that
many people were talking, but couldn’t hear a thing. Translucent or not, they
were walls, and there was no way out that she could see.

At the moment the thought formed
in her mind, she realized she’d made the same mistake again. Had she told
herself the walls weren’t there, or were flimsy, or breakable, or even had a
door-shaped hole in them, she could have made it true by channeling. But she had
already convinced herself she was in an enclosed space, and while she could
have gathered enough will to counteract that initial thought, she wasn’t sure
she could do it while in the middle of a duel.

That was all right, she told
herself. If she was trapped in this box, it meant that Rhuinn was, too, and
rather than trying to break the walls, she channeled to reinforce them with her
own will so he wouldn’t be able to break free any more easily than she would.
Let him see that she wasn’t afraid, nor was she bothered by the small space
around her.

She could see him gathering more
Quickening again. Before he could unleash it on her, she channeled first,
imagining him wearing handcuffs and ankle chains. He stumbled and came close to
falling, but Vivien’s small sense of progress vanished at once, much like the
bonds binding Rhuinn vanished. Laughing, he gestured toward her, and she
couldn’t step out of the flow of Quickening before it enveloped her in tight
ropes from her shoulders almost down to her knees.

She fought back the impulse to
struggle against the binding, and instead created a blade out of the Quickening
to slice the ropes. They disappeared as they fell off her, and she let the
blade fade away as well. She’d have liked to curl her hand around the hilt and
attack, but in this duel, she couldn’t.

His next attack was heat again.
This time, it rose from beneath her, and in seconds the stone floor was glowing
from the heat. A flash of panic overtook Vivien. She had known, abstractly,
that there were many ways for Rhuinn to hurt her without drawing blood or
putting her life in danger, but the oncoming pain seemed a lot more concrete.
She refocused her channeling as quickly as she could. She’d been about to
surround him with impenetrable darkness, but she needed to keep herself safe
first.

The image of Elver popped into her
mind, and his stone platform. She drew on the memory and felt the floor rising
beneath her feet, a perfect circle like the in-progress gazebo, though much
smaller. It blocked the heat even when Rhuinn redoubled his efforts, turning
the stone practically to lava around her platform.

Vivien used his momentary focus on
the heat to summon darkness around him, giving life to what, in her mind, she
called the ‘black hole.’ Whenever she’d tried this trick on Olric or Savel
while training with them, they’d soon given up, so that this had seemed like
her best bet to defeat Rhuinn. Channeling relied in great part on giving
substance to what one saw in their mind, and without the visual of the
Quickening doing what was demanded of it, it became harder, if not impossible,
to channel effectively.

She had to suppress a wave of
excitement when she noticed that the floor around her was back to its usual
form. She couldn’t see Rhuinn, not when pure absence of light surrounded him,
but she could still hear him. And she could hear him chuckle.

“Is that how you expect to win?”
he asked, mocking. “By wielding darkness like a child afraid of the night?”

She didn’t reply. Aedan had said
Rhuinn might taunt her, try to make her lose her focus. She wouldn’t fall for
such an easy trick. Keeping silent, she strengthened the black hole and could
see that the people outside their cage were looking around them as the light
decreased in the entire ballroom, sucked into infinite darkness.

“But what else could I expect from
a child?” Rhuinn continued in the same tone. “After all, you’ve been thinking
like a child since you returned to our world. Are you going to challenge all of
the people who had a hand in your mother’s death the way you challenged me? You
do realize you might have to battle half the High Families if that’s your
intention, don’t you? Even your friend Dame Solea did nothing to help Eleoren
in the end.”

Telling herself not to listen to
him because he was a liar was one thing; remembering Deltrea’s words and the
veiled hints that she had something to forgive his family for, however, made it
more difficult.

“Of course,” Rhuinn went on, still
not channeling as far as she could see, “you’re not here to avenge her. You came
at me raging over the death of an old servant who had no ties to you and who
died from the shock of coming back to Foh’Ran after all those years, and over
the death of a man I had nothing to do with.”

“Liar!” she shouted, unable to
contain herself. That he would dare say this when she’d followed Brad’s killer
to this very palace incensed her.

She formed chains in her mind,
restraints she could place over him, even a gag to stop his lies and blindfold
to prevent him from seeing and channeling effectively, but the black hole
stopped her just as it did him: if she couldn’t see him, she couldn’t put the
chains on him.

“Believe what you want,” he said,
sounding bored as though he weren’t in the middle of a duel that wasn’t going
well for him. “I had nothing to do with it. What would I gain from removing the
main source of distraction from your life?”

The chains Vivien had prepared
wavered in her mind, finally disappearing. He was a liar, she repeated to
herself. Aedan had told her he was. If he lied to the entire kingdom, why
wouldn’t he lie to her now?

Then again, why would he lie about
this? They were isolated from the rest of the court. He could admit to anything
in here and only she would hear it. So why bother denying his involvement…
unless he was telling the truth?