Page 2 of Starside

A roaring has me wrenching my head back up. Next to the platform, a tower of flame shoots skyward, crackling in shades of shredded sunset.

I don’t have to wonder what it’s for—I know. The bodies that don’t make it onto the stone will be thrown into the fire, left to burn.

I swallow. It’s almost time.

“Looking to feed the flames?”

The gravelly voice comes from a slim, tall man with slicked-back hair, leaning all his weight upon a sword I’d bet my own dagger he can’t hold up properly. Metal is heavy. Most men who visit the forge want the biggest weapon they can afford, but few can get it off the ground when it counts.

At his statement, several heads turn toward us.

Fuck.

Though my tongue itches to ask the man if he’s looking to sharpen my blade, preferably between his ribs, I push my metal higher up my wrist and offer my most sheepish of smiles.

“Of course not. Just trying to get a better view.” My voice says That’s ridiculous. Me? Try to qualify for the Questral? That would kill me. It echoes what Stellan told me this morning when he saw the dagger in my hand.

“I didn’t fish you from the ashes to watch you die in the gods-damned village square,” Stellan said, yet there he is in the crowd, watching me from afar with narrowed eyes, his white brows furrowed in frustration. He shakes his head, letting me know, until my very last breath, that he did not sanction this.

“You’ve trained me for this,” I told him in the forge, the place I grew up, the splitting of steel as natural as his endless whistling. He found me in the gutters of this world when I was just a child, an orphan with nothing to her name. Not even a name, really.

At that, his eyes lit with a fury so fierce it nearly diminished the forge behind him. Then that anger melted into something I had never seen in his expression before. Terror. “This isn’t what I wanted.”

Still, he didn’t ask for the dagger back, even though it’s the greatest weapon he’s ever made, crafted from a piece of a world so cruel and deadly, he’s refused to speak of it. Even to me.

Which is a shame, because the knowledge of how Stellan made it to be one of the Fifty would have really helped right about now.

No, he won’t watch me die. Not yet. I’m going to make it to the platform. First, though, I need to get past this man who is digging a hole into the ground with his sword. He’s still studying me far too closely.

I shrink into myself, as if unnerved by his notice. As if afraid of the sword he can’t even hold up. I take a shaking step back, shoe sinking into the mud.

The man smirks, taking his time to look me over, his gaze snagging on my clothing. He must be wondering why I’m wearing long sleeves and fabric up to my chin in scorching heat. He must be noticing the clear lack of scabbard and baldric. He frowns when he reaches my worn boots, the fabric shrunken and split. The people to his left and right turn back around, already uninterested.

But he keeps looking, taking in my brown hair that I carefully braided and pinned at the back of my head, to keep the long strands out of my face—and to keep others from using it against me. It might be the most obvious sign that I’m here for something other than entertainment, but his stare just wanders, until it finally meets mine.

All at once, his interest grows. My eyes—they’re dark blue. A rare shade. Now, I wish they were a different color entirely.

I don’t drop my gaze. He tilts his head. Finally, he leans toward me, his metal leaning with him. “Don’t let me stop you.”

I smile my thanks and pass him by.

That’s when his hand slides down my body. Squeezes. I freeze.

Bile crawls up my throat, but I swallow it and the urge to cut his hand clean off. I can’t be noticed. Not yet, so many rows away.

I do what I’ve done for years. I bury the rage and keep moving.

That’s when a scream cuts through the crowd like a scythe.

The silver hawk. Its sharp beak is opened wide, emitting a piercing wail.

It’s time.

A flash of color snags my attention as a man hurls himself from a rooftop, attempting to get onto the stone by jumping. It looks like he might make it.

He almost does.

Then, just before his feet land, a guard’s sword goes through his gut. He slips in his own blood right off the stone.