In the fourth year of the War, Master Ôrun developed a fighting form that combined Dherak control with physical combat. He called it the silent blade, because the true warrior never told his opponent what was coming. The form has since been lost. Or hidden.

Fragment of a letter, sender and recipient unknown, found in the Council's archives

Chapter 18

The Duel

It began in combat on a Tuesday in the fourth week.

Haltora took us down to the river. He stood in the shallows by the bank with his thick combat robe over the black tunic, and the wolf lay on the stones behind him. Around him lay a circle of flat stones, four paces across, set out in the water so that it came up to our ankles. There was ice along the edge, thin as glass, and the water was so clear you could see every stone on the bottom.

"Today you duel," said Haltora. His voice carried across the water without his raising it. "No swords. No words. Whoever says anything has lost. You may use your hands and what you have inside you. Whoever falls, or steps out over the stones, has lost."

He walked slowly along the bank and paired us off with a movement of his hand that allowed no discussion. Will with a girl from Vessa's team. Marcus with Torin. Retia with a boy who was a head taller than her and already looked nervous.

And then he pointed at me. And at Nihil.

Of course.

Nihil stood on the opposite side of the circle with his trousers rolled up over his knees. He stood loosely, but his fingers were clenched and his knuckles were white. His scent of winter wind and bare iron was sharper today, colder, with an edge that hadn't been there during the stratego games. At his wrist a white nose poked out of his sleeve and sniffed at the water. Then it drew back in.

We stepped out into the circle. The other students stayed on the bank and formed a ring around us, and it went quiet the way it goes quiet when people stop breathing. Retia stood in the front row with her arms folded and a face that was tight with something she wasn't saying. Ahra stood beside her with Lynx pressed against his leg and his hands down in his pockets, and his fingers were moving in there, nervous and invisible.

The water round my ankles was so cold it stung, and the stones underfoot were slippery, and the air smelt of frost and wet stone and of the wolf, and under that of the metallic note Dherak has when a lot of people are holding it back at once.

I stood with my feet shoulder-width apart and my hands in front of me. I could feel my Dherak flow down into my arms, and something else came up to meet it through the soles of my feet: the river. The same slow, old current as in the mornings. It knew me.

Nihil stood with his weight on his back foot and his hands low. His eyes were blue and flat and focused, and his body was still the way bodies are still when they are ready to move fast.

Haltora raised his hand. "Begin."

For a moment we just stood and looked at each other. His blue eyes held mine. My green ones held his. And in that moment I felt something through the water between us, something that came from him: not hatred, not anger, but a will so concentrated that it felt physical, a pressure against my chest. He wanted to win. Not to humiliate me. Because it was the only thing he had to give.

Nihil attacked.

It was fast. Faster than anything I had seen in the training lessons. He said nothing, but his hand shot forward, flat, without touching me, and something hit me in the shoulder like a wave breaking over a jetty. His Dherak. It felt like plunging my hands into ice water, and I took a step back, and the water slopped up round my shins.

He attacked again. Lower this time, at my legs. I felt it coming through the water before it came, moved my foot and pushed back with both hands, but he was already out of the way, turned aside with a movement too controlled to be instinctive. Everything Nihil did was deliberate. Every step, every push, every turn had been thought through before it was carried out.

I fought differently. My body reacted before my head had time to think. My hands found his cold without my eyes telling them where it was. It was the same feeling as on the Fjord Run, on the slope, in the stream: my body knew something my head hadn't understood yet.

We fought. Push and counter-push, without a sound but the water. Nihil's Dherak pressed against mine like ice trying to freeze a river, and my Dherak pressed back, warm and wide and deep, and every time it did, the water rose in a small wave round my legs and settled again. We moved around the circle, round and round, and the other students had vanished from my awareness, and there was only him and me and the cold water and the cold smell of winter wind and the warm current in my arms.

He was good. Better than me at technique. His pushes landed exactly where he wanted them, and his footwork on the slippery stones was flawless. But I was stronger. Not physically. In Dherak. And the river was on my side. Every time our powers met, I felt his give a centimetre, and mine hold.

But he didn't give up. Nihil Mathson was many things, but he wasn't someone who gave up.

We fought for what felt like hours but was probably minutes. Sweat ran down my neck, even though my feet had long since stopped feeling anything. Nihil's face was red, and his breathing was fast, but his eyes were the same: blue and flat and completely focused.

He pressed me. A hard push at my side, and I stepped back onto a stone that tipped, and lost my balance for a split second. He saw it. He threw himself forward with his hand flat towards my chest, everything he had in one push, and I knew I couldn't stand against it in time, and that I was about to fall.

Alôpex leapt.

Not at Nihil. At his arm. She struck it with her paws the instant his hand was a centimetre from my chest, and the push went past me and out over the water, and Nihil fell forward with his own momentum and caught himself on his right hand against the stones on the bottom. I heard his wrist hit the stone.

I straightened up. Stood still, with water to my ankles and my heart in my throat.

Nihil got up onto his knees and then onto his feet, holding his right wrist in against his stomach. He looked down at Alôpex, who stood between us in the water with her fur wet and on end and her teeth bared, and his face was unreadable.

"Stop," said Haltora. He was standing at the edge of the circle with his arms folded. "Mathson fell. Godrand had help. A draw."

The bank was silent. Everyone was looking. Retia stood with her arms folded tight and a face that said she was relieved and cross at the same time. Ahra stood with his mouth open and Lynx pressed against his leg.

Nihil and I stood facing each other in the circle, wet and out of breath, while the water slowly settled round our legs.

"Your fox," said Nihil. It was the first word either of us had said. His voice was flat with exhaustion.

"Yes," I said. "Sorry."

"That was cheating."

"Yes."

Nihil looked at Alôpex. Alôpex looked up at him with her black eyes and didn't growl. She just looked. And Nihil looked back, and something in his face changed. Not a smile. Just a small opening, a crack in the wall he always carried.

"But your fox is fast," he said. "And you're not as bad as I thought."

He held out his left hand, because the right one wouldn't. It wasn't a salute I knew. It was just a hand.

I took it. It was cold and wet against mine. Warmth on cold. A brief moment of contact, and then he let go.

Nihil nodded. A short nod. And that was the closest Nihil Mathson had ever come to smiling. It lasted a split second, a small movement at one corner of his mouth that was gone before it had properly arrived. But it was there. And I had seen it.

He turned and waded back up the bank to his place in the ring among his own team. Will and Marcus stood one on each side of him, and he was alone all the same. Will looked at him with a face that was half relieved and half something else. Nihil didn't look at his brother. But his shoulders were a centimetre lower than when he had gone out into the circle, and that said enough.

Haltora stopped me on the way up from the river.

"Godrand." He stood on the path with his arms folded and the wolf at his feet. His scent of iron and night air was stronger now, warmed by the lesson we had just had. "Your fox."

"I know," I said.

"In a real fight," he said, and his voice was low and serious, "your opponent would have killed your Amícûs for that. Remember it."

He went. The wolf followed without a sound.

I stood alone on the path and felt his words settle. Not as a threat. As a truth. And truths are heavier than threats, because you can't ignore them.

That evening I sat on my bed looking down at my hands. They were still trembling faintly, not from exhaustion but from the Dherak that had run through them all afternoon and hadn't settled yet. Alôpex lay in my lap with her eyes closed.

Nihil sat on his own bed opposite me, winding a strip of cloth round his right wrist, slowly, with one end between his teeth. The room smelt of sweat and cold stone and the salve he had been given in the infirmary. He didn't look at me. But he could see my face, and I knew he could.

"You shouldn't have done that," I said to her in my thoughts.

"You were about to lose."

"That's not the point."

"That's exactly the point," she said. "I'm your Amícûs. It's my job to protect you."

"Even from losing a practice duel?"

"From everything." Her voice in my head was calm and warm and completely certain. "Always."

I stroked her fur. Soft and thick and smelling of ice and earth and clean air. Her heart beat slowly against my wrist.

"It was cheating," I said.

"It was love," she said. "That's not the same thing."

I said nothing. But there was something in what she said that settled somewhere in me and wouldn't move. That love and cheating aren't the same thing. That you can break the rules to protect someone and still be right. That the world isn't divided into right and wrong, but into reasons that are good enough and reasons that aren't.

It was a thought I would carry with me for a long time.

Nihil put out the lamp. I heard him lie down, and the mattress creak, and the blanket being pulled up. The dark was thick and cold.

"Next time without the fox," he said into it.

"Next time," I said.