Page 122 of The Poet Empress
“Someone stop him,” Silian begged from where she was sitting with her husband’s men. “He’s going to die if he keeps going like this.” She shook Song Siming’s shoulders in desperation, but Siming shook his head in resignation. Mei Yu only sat frozen in horror, along with the rest of Maro’s advisors.
Maro changed his strategy again. With a flare of his sigil, he summoned a river to catch Terren in its torrent; as the water rushed towards the canyon, Terren leapt off his swords and onto solid ground in time to dam it—with a fresh wall of interlocked blades, like a great wing erupting from the ground. The river broke around it. Became a roaring waterfall as it crashed into the canyon. Maro attacked from a new direction, sending a fresh river hurtling towards Terren; but Terren raised his arm across his body and the wing folded, like an immense gray owl’s, to block it once again. The water slammed into the blades so fiercely its spray reached all the way to the treetops.
River after river, dam after dam. Before long, water was flooding the arena. Lashing against the wind, washing away leaves and rubble, dissolving salt.
And the dragon woke.
Perhaps because its belly was now drenched in salt water, ankle-deep; perhaps because of the way the earth rang with each burst of blades. In any case, one glass eye had slid open.
“No!” Silian screamed. “Get out of there!”
But it was useless. Maro couldn’t hear her. And even if he could, I was not sure he would listen. His?/Lu sigil was burning, burning like a sun, as he slammed his staff down again, this time summoning a road. Cobblestones paved themselves, like a carpet unrolling, a gray wave making straight for his brother. Terren erupted a second wing of swords from theground, crossing it with the first to block.Smash. Crack.A spray of rubble smothered the white blooms of new lilies.
It went on and on. Roads and rivers, bridges and canyons, Maro somehow improvising his seal magic into one he could do battle with, Terren defending with equal ferocity. Maro built bridge after bridge in an attempt to reach his brother; Terren blocked every last one of them with knives. In no time, the arena had turned into a frothing, furious landscape of spitting stone and hurling water; and the trees fell crashing, and the sky shook, and the earth broke.
The light in Maro’s seal was sputtering out.
After he sent yet another flood of water towards Terren, he doubled over to catch his breath, wiping at the blood pouring from his mouth. Then he slammed his staff back onto the ground, his sigil glowing again, but almost instantly it extinguished.
Maro swayed, clutching his chest.
Terren lowered his shield of swords and leveled his dark gaze at his brother.
Another feeble flicker of the?/Lu sigil. Another attempt to summon magic. But it still wasn’t working. Maro leaned heavily on his staff, coughing uncontrollably, blood flecking his soaked white-gold robes. And then a shadow fell over him.
Terren’s eyes flicked up to meet the dragon looming over Maro. Maro noticed at the same time. He took a few stumbling steps away, but he was far too weak to be swift—and the Crown swooped down and snapped its mighty jaws. When it rose again, both the first prince and a chunk of the arena were gone.
The crowd fell into a horrified silence. It dragged on for first one heartbeat, then another, then another. Then, all at once, bits of chewed rock and viscera fell from the sky like someone’s nightmarish idea of rain, and Silian—along with everyone in the West Palace, the tent, and the terraces below—screamed and screamed.
A piece of entrail—or brain, or heart; it was hard to tell—landed on Terren’s cheek. He peeled it off, looked at it with disgust, and flicked it to the ground.
“Good night, Maro.”
67BLOOD AND SALT
Terren subdued the dragon quickly and unspectacularly. It had already been near its end—its strike at Maro had been a desperate one, a dying thrash—and after only a few quick sword maneuvers, it slammed into the near side of the arena and fell limp next to the barrier.
Then it was over. Maro was dead, the dragon felled. Everything was decided.
The audience did not cheer. Witnessing a prince’s death—and not the one they would have expected—seemed to have stunned everyone into solemnity.
I left the tent behind and began making my way down the long, carpeted steps, passing by torches, the tasseled statues of fortune lions, the flapping?/Dao banners. The summer winds—which did not seem to be blocked by the literomantic barrier—carried the scent of salt and ash. Nobody stopped me. I was as close to being empress now as Terren was to being emperor.
As I passed the second layer, I overheard some of the ministers still trying to figure out exactly who had cast the Blessing, exactly what it was.
“It must be a heart-spirit poem. I do not know what else can penetrate that barrier.”
“No—can’t be. That is a killing spell, not a healing one!”
“Will the Crown forgive the prince his use of it?”
Terren waded through the foaming, ankle-deep water to the dragon, the little fish following him as a golden glimmer. He knelt by its snout and sank the silver dagger into its scales. Red rivulets of magic glowed brightas he began his persuasion once again. Let the Dao power be amplified. Let the coming reign be one of blades.
Probably,I thought, in answer to the literomancer’s question. The dragons accepted no literomancy in the taming process—and there hadn’t been any. The spell had not been used in the fight against the Crown, but to save Terren from Maro. And in any case, it had been cast by someone outside the arena.
I reached the bottom of the square, stepped past the hushed audience, the imperial guards, and the literomancers, and put my hand to the barrier. It felt like nothing, not even glass. But my hand could not move past it at all. I was reminded of how the Aricine Ward had stopped me from touching Terren, the night the rumors came and we had tried to bed each other.
The little fish wriggled its way from beside Terren towards my hand. Terren’s eyes followed it. Without taking his hand off the dragon, he used a floating sword to trace a quick spell on the ground, releasing his part of the barrier spell. A moment later, the air in front of my hand rippled. He had let me in.
