Venture broke another finger and another. Screaming, panting, and barely managing gurgling, bloody breaths, the intruder let go with his mangled hand, but he still clung on with the other one.
“You can let go and crawl away,” Venture said, “or I’ll break them all, and then I’ll take your sword and run you through.”
The intruder coughed out more blood. “You should die now,” he slurred though cracked and swelling lips. “They came to warn you, but you should die now.”
“Who? Who came to warn me?”
The door burst open in answer. A mass of masked men and swords crowded through and filed onto the mat.
Oh, my God. What is this?
“Them,” gasped the man at Venture’s feet, unbelievably, with a smile.
“You were supposed to come get us when you saw him, not take him on!” One of the men took a step forward, but another man caught his arm and he held back.
“Venture Delving, do not move!” said the man who’d stopped him.
Venture ignored the warning. He gave the crazy man at his feet a fierce kick in the head and grabbed the hilt of the sword.
“Hands off that sword, or you die now!” the same man said.
Half the men had daggers raised, ready to throw at Venture. They looked like the type who had good aim.
“Champ, stop!” Dasher and Earnest emerged from the changing room. They stood, half dressed but fully armed, a few paces behind him.
“Do not touch that man or his sword!” commanded the leader of the group. “We came to deliver you a warning, Venture Delving. Stand up straight and look at us.”
At the sound of Dasher’s voice, Venture had frozen in place as he bent to take the sword. Now he straightened up and regarded the mob—tall, strong men, all of them.
Their leader gestured at the others to either side of him. “There are twenty of us. Do you think you can take us all on? Let him go and listen to me.” To Dasher and Earnest he said, “You two. Put your swords away. We don’t want to hurt either of you. But,” he pointed his sword at Venture, “you, bondsman, we will kill.”
Dasher and Earnest hesitated, swords still in hand. Venture could feel the heat of their anger rising in the air behind him.
“Do it, or we will kill him now!”
Steel slid against Steel as Earnest and Dasher sheathed their swords. Venture crossed his arms and glared. “What’s this warning you’ve come to give me?”
“Withdraw from the Championship, or death will find you.”
“I’d rather die than withdraw.”
The leader’s eyes darkened in the narrow slits of his mask. He pointed with the tip of his sword. “What about you?
Dasher!
”
He said
Dasher
in a mocking tone strikingly different from the reverent one with which strangers typically pronounced the Champion’s name.
“If you help him do this there will be death and it will be on your hands! Can you live with that?”
“I am not afraid of you!” Dasher shouted back.
“You will be—all three of you. You have been warned.”
Let them throw their knives. Let them kill me now if they’re so determined to see me dead.
Crested scum
. Though he could tell none of them were Hunter Longlake, they talked Crested. They walked Crested. And who else would do such a thing, would think they could get away with such a thing? Venture kicked angrily, frivolously at the gasping man, now lying curled on his side. Something else cracked, and the man screamed.
“Vent!” Earnest cried a warning.
Venture ignored him and hollered at the man he’d beaten, “Get up! Get up and go home with your cowardly friends!”
The knives didn’t come. Were they afraid of missing, of hitting their friend by mistake? The man struggled onto his knees, sucking for air. His injured hand was clutched to his chest and the broken and dislocated fingers stuck out at sickening angles. He couldn’t so much as crawl.
“What’s the matter?” Venture challenged the armed crowd, “none of you dares come close enough to help your friend? Or is his life just as worthless to you as mine?”
That must be it. He’d deviated from their plan, and they were willing to sacrifice him. Venture stood beside the kneeling man. Taking hold of his collar with one hand and his fine brown leather belt with the other, he dragged him roughly across the mat, lifting then pulling, lifting then pulling.
“What are you doing?” Dasher said.
“Just helping the man out.”
Venture left a long, thick streak of blood from the sword, still sticking up in a red pool, to the point where he finally ripped off the mask and flung the man at the polished boots of the others.
His face was so swollen, torn, and bloody, that even if he were someone he’d met before, Venture wouldn’t have recognized him. Venture crossed his arms and glared at the row of armed men not two feet in front of him. He looked all down the line into the eyes peering out at him through their masks.
“I’m a fighter.” Venture brought his bloodstained palm to his chest. “I
will
fight in the Championship, and I
will
win.”
He turned his back on them. His friends stood at the opposite end of the mat, Earnest in workout shorts but still with his street shirt on, Dasher wearing only his unbuttoned pants and his scabbard. Both of them were anxiously gripping the hilts of their swords. Their eyes darted among the row of men. They were waiting for one of them to attack, waiting to defend him.
Venture strode over to the sword, protruding upright from the mat. He drew it out, sending bits of severed straw flying into the air. They drifted down and floated in the spilled blood as he held out the sword. With a sideways flick of his forearm, he sent the sword sailing through the air, forcing the row of masked men to shove each other out of its way.
“Don’t forget your sword! Now get out!” Venture said.
The leader waved the others out. Then he turned and faced Venture’s furious glare with total calmness.
“Remember, you are only alive because we chose not to kill you today, Venture Delving,” he said. And then he left.
“Should we go for the lawmen?” Earnest said.
“No! Nobody needs to know about this!”
“Vent—”
“What will Justice say, Earnest? You think he’ll let me compete after this? This can’t get all over town. Whatever they have planned for me, I’ll have to deal with it when it comes.”
Venture pulled off his bloody shirt and wiped the spatters of Crested blood off his face with it. He was shaking.
“You all right, Champ?”
“Earnest, we need hot water.” Venture ignored Dasher’s concern and snatched some towels from a shelf. He strode onto the mat and soaked up the blood where that man’s head had lain while he beat on him.
“What are you doing, Champ?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?” He snapped the towel against the mat. “I have to clean this up before everyone gets here.”
“Leave that and rest for a minute. We’ll get somebody to take care of it,” Earnest said.
“I don’t need anyone to clean up after me. I can do it myself.”
Dasher squatted down beside him. “
Vent
. I’m your friend. I want to do it. Let me take care of it for you. Okay?”
Venture paused, then nodded. He put the towel in Dasher’s open hand. He allowed Earnest to lead him a few feet away, to the edge of the mat. He sat back on his heels, rubbing at his temples.
Earnest settled down beside him. “You know that man, Vent? Any of them?”
He shook his head and considered telling him what had happened the night before. But that couldn’t have anything to do with this. Bringing twenty men in from out of town wasn’t something Prowess Longlake could pull off in a matter of hours, and he might not even know yet about what had happened to his son. Venture’s problem, his opposition, was even bigger than he’d imagined.
“He wanted to kill me. He wanted me dead today. And he wanted me to know it. Did you see what I did to him? I warned him, and I hurt him, and he wouldn’t stop. He would’ve died just to have me dead.”
“He was crazy.”
“He hates me. They all hate me. They’re Crested, and you know it. How many Cresteds out there hate me for what I’m doing? And you two want to take sides against them?”
Dasher stopped scrubbing at the soiled canvas and looked up at him. “No right man could hate you, Champ.”
“Twenty Crested men want me dead and not you. It’s worth a life to them. They say they don’t want me to fight, but they won’t kill you to prevent it, only me. Why?”
Dasher flushed, then exchanged a look with Earnest.
“Because whether you’re helping me to do something Crested Society thinks I shouldn’t or not, you’re not expendable like me.”
“They are fools!” Dasher pointed his finger at him. “You’re worth more than the mob of them put together. I don’t care who I have to side against, I will see to it that you live to fight in the Championship this year, and the next and the next, as long as you’re willing.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Venture apologized to Beamer for ruining one of his mats. Earnest told Beamer that a fool looking for a fight had come after Venture, and Venture kept his mouth shut about the rest. His old coach noticed the strange look on his face; he knew it, but he didn’t push him about it.
Venture insisted on going on with his workout as planned. He ignored the pain streaking through his right elbow and his foot, not wanting to stop, to dwell on what had happened. He shook with rage when he entertained the slightest thought of it.
Beamer’s had been a place where he could put his rage, put everything else, aside.
There are no Cresteds in there. There never will be
, Grant had said the day he brought him there, when he was just a scared, angry kid.
It’s a different world in there
. Grant had probably thought it would be a good respite for him, a place to take a break from everything the rest of the world insisted that he be. He couldn’t have guessed that opening those bright red doors for him would open up a hope for an entirely different sort of life.
But Cresteds had come, and they’d done their best to trample that hope. Now, even on the mat, his fears whispered to him in the intervals between blows, between throws, between submissions.
I’ll never have Jade. Focus, fight. I might not even live for long. Duck, block, strike. I could die by the sword. Push-pull, sweep. I could die in a fight. Hooks in, roll, secure the upper half. Like my father, die fighting for a prize. Elbow to elbow, one with his arm, legs locked.
He brought his attacks on faster and faster, one after the other, squeezing all other thoughts out, fighting for the calm that had once come so easily here, leaving his fears no room to be heard as he talked himself through each drill, each round.
Venture’s hands were bruised and raw, his elbow strained. The foot he’d used to sweep his would-be assassin’s feet out from under him was painfully swollen, maybe broken, and his body was beyond weary by the time he arrived at the Big House that afternoon to work. He held one nail in his mouth as he knelt in the stable, pounding another into the stall wall to tighten up a loose board.
Death will find you.
He pounded again, pounded out his response, for he couldn’t pound the voice out of his ears.
Death will find you. I almost killed a man. People want to kill me.
A few feet away, Lightning whined and pawed at the ground, but she stayed there, stayed away, as he’d told her to. He cursed under his breath, flipped the hammer over in his hand, pried out the crooked nail. He laid it on the ground, hammered it straight again, and started over. He took a deep breath and held the nail steady between thumb and forefinger. Then he noticed the traces of dried blood under his nails.
He heard the sword ripping through the canvas and the straw. He saw the blood pooling.
But none of it was mine. It won’t be mine. I’ll live, at least until the Championship. Somehow. They won’t conquer me with fear. I’ll fight for what’s mine, inside the arena or out.
But that wasn’t good enough. He needed to win a Championship, and the odds of that this year—well, Dasher was hopeful and so was he, but that woman the Cresteds had sent to warn him was right. The chances weren’t good.
He brought the hammer back and struck the nail on the head, straight and true.
What kind of brute have you become?
he heard Jade screaming. He remembered the feel of her fists on his midsection. He pounded the nail flat, then brought his free hand to rest on one of the bruises she’d left there. He longed for her, even for her fists—anything. He sat back on his heels and brought one arm to his face. The other, still holding the hammer, dropped to the ground.
How I would have fought for you, Jade, if only . . .
He pushed himself up, feeling the searing pain in his foot as he did so. He needed to get out of here. Lightning took that as an invitation to come to his side and nuzzle against him. He scratched her behind the ears. Even she was worried about him.
He felt a little better once he was all scrubbed up, the dirt and the blood brushed and soaped away, his shirt clean and fresh.
“Venture,” Mrs. Bright called to him from the kitchen.
He stepped up from the washroom, limping, coat in hand.
“What is it?” he asked patiently, though he knew. Hunter Longlake. It was hard for the others to believe he wouldn’t be in trouble for it, without knowing everything that had happened. Nearly every servant in the household had managed to find some excuse to come by as he worked and ask him why he’d punched out the mistress’s suitor. “He deserved it,” was all they’d gotten out of him.
“I’m worried about you.”
“You shouldn’t be.”
She patted his arm. “Everyone says you won’t talk about it. I don’t want to pry. But just tell me you’re not going to be in trouble for this.”
“I don’t think so. Master’s taken care of it.”
“You’re in trouble with the lady, though. She’s furious with you.”
“Don’t worry about me.” He looked away, feeling himself flush.
“Still, I worry about the Mistress. Master won’t let her see the young gentleman. You know how she can be when someone stands in the way of what she wants to do. You don’t know how she’s been the last couple of years. Not herself at all. Not just restless, like she gets sometimes, but angry and almost hopeless, and then she started seeing that man and things were looking up a bit. Now . . . sometimes I think, or maybe I hope, that you might be able to do something to help.”