The hall stayed silent while every cara held its angle on Jas.
He stood a few steps from Cormac with blood still drying on his knuckles from the punch. O’Shea remained between them with one hand lowered after stopping the ice attack, and the broken pieces of frost were still lting into dark patches on the marble floor. Near the wall by the exit, his mother held Nyra against her side while keeping one hand flat on the small girl’s back, and Nyra had gone quiet in the way children go quiet when they sense sothing is wrong without understanding what.
Cormac wiped the blood from his lip with the back of his hand and looked around the room to make sure he still had everyone’s attention before he spoke again.
"In case anyone missed it," he said while raising his voice so the press section caught every word, "I’ll say it again clearly. Three months from tonight. Jas Ganner against . Challenger Blood Writ. No surrender clause. Death decides it."
He let that settle over the room before adding the part he wanted the caras to rember.
"Three months," he repeated while a slow smile spread across his bloodied mouth. "I’ll give him the ti. Train all he wants. Find every advantage he can buy or borrow. Three months won’t change what happens when we stand across from each other."
The line was ant to sound like confidence, and it landed that way for most of the room. Giving an opponent ti to prepare was the kind of thing only soone certain of winning would do, and the murmur that had questioned him earlier shifted into sothing more uncertain. He had heard the room doubt him before the challenge, and now he was using the three months to bury that doubt under a display of control he did not entirely feel.
Jas said nothing.
He looked past Cormac to where his mother stood holding Nyra. She t his eyes and did not say a word, but the small shake of her head and the tightness in her face said all of it. Don’t. Not again. Not another death match.
The silence stretched while Jas did not answer, and Cormac read it the way drunk n read silence.
"Nothing to say?" he asked while taking a half step forward. "You had plenty to say with your fist a minute ago. You were brave enough to swing at in front of all these people, but now you want to stand there quiet and let TRB and the caras and everyone’s sympathy do the talking for you."
Jas kept his eyes on him and stayed silent.
"That’s what I thought." Cormac turned slightly toward the room while gesturing back at Jas with one hand. "He’ll throw a punch when he thinks he can get away with it, but a real challenge? Sothing with rules and witnesses and consequences? He goes quiet."
A few people near the edges of the crowd shifted uncomfortably, but most stayed locked on the exchange because there was no looking away from it now.
Jas still did not react, and the lack of reaction seed to bother Cormac more than anything Jas could have said. He had wanted a shouting match, a public loss of control, sothing that would make Jas look like the unstable one. Instead Jas just watched him with a stillness that started to feel like its own kind of insult.
So Cormac reached for the one thing that had worked before.
"Maybe your mother taught you to keep your head down," he said, and his eyes flicked toward the woman holding the child by the exit. "It suited her well enough. People who clean up after their betters learn to stay quiet."
The temperature of Jas’s anger changed.
It was not the hot, imdiate thing that had driven the punch. It was colder and slower and entirely under his control, and the difference showed in the way his shoulders settled and his expression went flat instead of tight.
He was not reacting anymore.
He was deciding.
"I accept."
The two words cut through the hall without Jas raising his voice, and they carried further for being quiet.
A ripple went through the room. Sowhere near the press section a sharp intake of breath was audible, then another, and then the low rush of dozens of people speaking at once before catching themselves and going quiet again to hear what ca next.
Cormac’s smile widened because he believed he had won sothing.
By the exit, Jas’s mother went completely still while her hand pressed flatter against Nyra’s back. She had hoped, in the stretched-out silence, that Jas would walk away. The acceptance landed on her like a weight, and her face drained of color while she understood exactly what her son had just agreed to in front of an entire room.
Jas did not look at Cormac when he said it. He looked at nothing in particular, the way soone looks when the decision is already made and the rest is just procedure.
"Three months," he said. "I’ll be there."
Cormac opened his mouth to add sothing, but O’Shea spoke first and shut the whole exchange down.
"Then it’s done, and it’ll be done properly."
O’Shea’s voice carried the authority of soone who did not need to raise it, and the room turned toward him because he was the only person present whose word could make any of this official or stop it entirely. He looked like a man who wanted to stop it and knew he could not, because the challenge had been issued and accepted before recognized witnesses, and Challenger law did not bend for the preferences of the people enforcing it.
He raised one hand slightly, and a TRB official near the back moved forward through the crowd with a tablet already in hand.
"Record it," O’Shea said.
The official began entering the terms while reading them aloud for the witnesses and the caras. "Challenger Blood Writ, invoked and accepted before TRB officials, guild representatives, and assembled guests. Formal duel between two registered Challengers." He glanced up briefly. "Nas for the record."
"Jas Ganner," O’Shea said. He looked at the eldest Ganner son. "And you."
"Cormac Ganner," the man said, and the official entered it before continuing.
"Date set for three months from tonight, location and oversight to be assigned by the Tower Resource Bureau. The duel is to the death. No surrender clause has been declared by the challenging party." He paused on that line before continuing. "Outside interference of any kind is forbidden under Challenger combat law. TRB oversight is mandatory. Failure by either party to appear on the assigned date, without a legal exemption granted in advance, constitutes forfeiture, and forfeiture under a Blood Writ carries the sa weight as a loss."
He looked up from the tablet at both of them.
"Do both parties understand the terms as recorded?"
"Yes," Cormac said while the blood on his lip had started to dry.
Jas said it without any weight at all. "Yes."
O’Shea stepped forward then, and his next words were directed at both of them but his eyes were mostly on Jas. "Understand this before you put your nas to it. Once the writ is signed, TRB cannot protect either of you from the terms. Not from the date, not from the outco, not from each other. There is no clause I can invoke to undo it after tonight short of both of you withdrawing together, and from the look of the two of you, that isn’t happening."
Neither of them withdrew.
The official brought the tablet to Cormac first. He signed with a flourish, smiling through the blood, clearly enjoying the caras on him while he did it. Then the official carried it to Jas.
Jas signed without ceremony. He did not look at Cormac while he did it, and he did not look at the caras. He handed the tablet back, and the official confird the entry while a soft tone from the device marked the writ as formally recorded.
The drunken scene had beco a legal docunt, and there was no taking it back now.
User Comments
0 comments from readers