Page 135 of Of Bargains & Betrayal

With a deafening crack, sharp gray cliffs and valleys shot upwards, blocking the spectators from my view. Snow and pine trees spilled down the jagged slopes in every direction. A gorge tore across the arena to my right, and the once-roaring crowd was no more than a muted rumble in the distance.

All the air rushed out of my lungs at once.

Mountains.

Fucking. Mountains.

I should have felt a sliver of relief at the familiarity that washed over me, of the cool scent of alpine air running a reassuring touch over my soul. Gratitude, even. But neither of those things existed on the platform with me. A lick of inarguable fury had me clenching my fists at my side, waiting for my cue to start.

Maksym had no faith in me. Not in my strength, nor my fortitude.

Never mind my ability to assess and strategize or my years of experience.

At some point, he’d decided I didn’t stand a chance.

I was just a feeble, void Odessan. A woman at that, who didn’t stand a chance against his illustrious dark fae brethren. So he had to coax the arena to accommodate me. Get it to scale things down to my level.

Fuck. Him.

The moment the bellow of a horn echoed out, I hauled myself over the edge of the platform and broke into a run as soon as my feet touched the ground.

Find the markers. Destroy them. Make it out in one piece.

I could deal with the rest later.

The starting trail ended at a wall of sheer slate, easily ten times my height, and the frigid wind whipped back from it viciously enough to make my eyes water. At the very top, a glass lantern brimming with blue nytefire taunted me. There’d never been a cliff I couldn’t scale back in Odessa. Scrapes and cuts, sure, but never anything worse.

This wouldn’t be any different.

“Child’s play,” I muttered, and a gust nearly knocked me on my damn ass. A living arena; how could I forget?

I ran my hands over the scree-covered, frigid ground, coating them with fine powder for grip, before I notched my toes into my first foothold and launched myself up.

The rock, of course, was brutally brittle. Why wouldn’t it be, with my astounding luck? Each time I scaled a little farther, pieces crumbled against my fingers, sending shrapnel raining down my body and into the clearing below.

My heart thundered in displeasure at not knowing how much of the stone would give way with each push and grasp, but I maneuvered my body from one workable divot to the next with relative efficiency.

Until halfway up.

I sank my fingers into another unassuming divot, pushing up, and the entire fucking ledge supporting me snapped.

My stomach surged up my throat with an acrid burn, and I let out a startled yelp as I lost my grip on my new hold. For a few horrible beats of my heart, I was hanging by one arm and strained shoulder, pressed against the cliff face by a brutal gust of wind.

My boot scraped desperately for purchase, once, twice⁠—

I found a foothold and let out a shaky breath.

Before the terrain could change its mind, I launched myself upward.

The shift in difficulty from then on was stark.

I had to reach a little farther for every ledge. Grip smaller spans of rock with my numbing fingers. Work my toes into tinier crevices and push a little harder. Nothing I couldn’t handle⁠—

until I ran out of places to grip.

“For fuck’s sake,” I muttered as I scanned the last span of rock separating me from the cliff’s edge and that damned, taunting lantern.

Save for a few paper-thin creases in the stone, the rest of the span of the face was smooth as glass.