Page 93 of The Frost Queen's Blade

Snow flew up in tufts as the two women crashed together. Elma blocked her attacker’s first flurry of blows, but she moved almost as liquid-like as Rune. And a sword could only do so much against the close proximity of daggers.

Steel glanced off steel as Elma took a blow from the side, causing her to stagger, but the blade didn’t pierce the armor. Elma swung in response, barely missing the leather-clad woman.

They circled each other, breathing hard.

“I don’t want to kill you,” said the woman in black, grinning. “But I’m going to. You may as well surrender. What’s the point of drawing this out?”

Too out of breath to speak, and weighed down by her armor, Elma didn’t respond.Three coppers, she thought.

Her opponent smirked and went in for the kill. Elma hadn’t expected an attack so direct, not yet. She’d assumed Godwin, or the arena men, would have instructed Elma’s opponents to drag out the spectacle. But the woman in black didn’t seem to care or saw an opening she couldn’t pass up.

Her knives were too fast, her leap almost wild, and she twisted in mid-air, falling upon Elma like a bird of prey. Elma’s armor slowed her response, and she fell, tangled upwith the woman on top of her. She dropped her sword, instead choosing to grapple with her opponent. At these close quarters, a sword was useless anyway.

Blades bit into her arms, her chest, the force of them reverberating through her armor. But the woman’s thrusts weren’t strong enough to pierce it. So Elma, using that to her advantage, leveraged herself up with one arm, rolling on top of the other woman.

Elma’s opponent struggled and would have freed herself, but Elma did the only thing she could — she slammed her head, helmet and all, into the woman’s face. A horrible crunch emanated through the metal, and blood spurted from the woman’s nose. She let out a horrible scream of pain and frustration.

Elma could have ended it there, slamming her helmeted head into the woman again and again until her face turned to bloody pulp. But the thought of it turned her stomach. Even knowing that it might mean her death, that her man wouldn’t get his three coppers, Elma scrambled to her knees, still straddling her opponent, whose face was bright with blood.

Forcing herself not to think, not to wonder who this woman was, why she had initially been brought to fight in the arena, whether she had any family or people she loved… Elma picked up her sword.

“Your man’s next,” said the woman in black, coughing. A splash of blood colored her lips. “Thought I’d try to kill you first. So you’d—”

Elma slammed the sword tip down through the woman’s neck, severing her spine, killing her instantly. She didn’t want to hear whatever the woman had been about to say. Didn’t want to hear of mercy, of kindness. This woman was nobody, a dealer of death, that was all she could be. Elma couldn’tafford this regret, this pain, not now. Not in the arena, with death on the way to welcome her home.

She wrenched her blade from the woman’s body, unable to stop herself from shaking. Her knees wavered under the weight of her armor.

Your man’s next.

Forty

The horn sounded, though Elma barely heard it. For the second time, she stared up at the stands, where she knew Godwin was sitting. Frustratingly, she couldn't make out which shape in the crowd might be his. She hoped he was enjoying the show. It would be over soon.

From across the arena, movement caught her eye. She turned, pushing up the visor of her helmet to see him better. He moved with the usual confident swagger, but his gait was uneven. He was injured more than Elma had thought when she saw him in the dungeon, or Godwin really had stuck him with a blade before sending him out.

She grit her teeth, anger boiling up in her. She would kill Godwin for that. She would wait for him in the underworld if she had to and gut him with a blade in the after. Pulling off her helmet, she tossed to the side, snow pluming up around it where it landed.

Rune’s smile lit her heart. It didn’t matter that one of them was inevitably going to kill the other. All she knew was his face, the wind in his hair as he jogged to meet her, the wayher armor no longer felt heavy, the relief in just seeing him again.

They fell into one another, embracing in the snow, hearts hammering together as one. Elma thought she could feel his, even through her armor and his leather getup.

“Elma,” he said, wrapping a hand around the back of her neck. “Your uncle’s a fool if he thinks we’ll cut each other down.”

“He knows me,” she said, breathless, searching Rune’s face for injury. His jaw was bruised, and the remnants of a black eye was fading from one of his eyes. Cuts marred his lips and eyebrows, as if he’d been struck repeatedly by a bare fist. “He knows I’ll take my own life before taking yours.”

“Then he doesn’t know me at all,” Rune growled, “because I’ll dismantle this arena stone by stone before I watch you die.”

Elma sobbed hopelessly.

The horn sounded then in a sorrowful peel. And Elma realized that the arena had gone quiet. It was still packed with onlookers, but not a soul was cheering; no chants emanated from the stands. The air was as still as the eye of a storm.

“This doesn’t seem promising,” Rune said.

And out from the same archway Rune had come from, slavering and grinning like demons, stalked the Fang and his wolves.

“Shit,” Elma swore, quickly retrieving her helmet from the snow. Perhaps this was her uncle’s attempt at irony. “I’ll take the Fang; you go for the wolves.”

Rune stood fast beside her, his chest heaving. “I’d better tell you now, before it’s too late and it becomes awkward… your uncle may have given me a bit of a slow-bleeding wound before the fight.”

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