What she hadn’t planned was to see him as she turned. He was strapped down so he couldn’t turn his head. But he heard her. “Karris?” he shouted. “Dear Orholam, Karris, get out of here!”
His left side was to her, and blood trickled out of his eye, down his cheek, a stream of red tears from a wound that hadn’t been fully cauterized.
Her stomach caught and she tried to stifle a sob. She hunched over, but set her jaw. Weeping and running to him would mean death for both of them.
Put it aside, Karris.
“Your Excellency!” Karris snarled, whipping around to face the foul bitch who’d done this to Gavin. Her fear was gone, and her rage wasn’t red. “I declare my husband innocent of any wrong. By your own old traditions, I demand trial by combat!”
“I demand trial by combat,” she announced to the other half of the stadium. If only she had an orator’s voice that could be heard over fifty thousand murmuring souls. But most orators couldn’t pull off this dress, either.
She turned to the Nuqaba and lowered her voice, trying to project just enough for the woman and those privileged few in the front row to hear. “Or I tell everyone here our surname and rally those who are not traitors.”
The Nuqaba’s face gathered a storm. Eirene Malargos interjected some question. A quick volley of questions and responses between them, impossible to hear. Both angry. Both insistent.
There was no ancient Parian tradition of trial by combat. It was pure horse shit.
But the fifty thousand bloodthirsty Ruthgari spectators in the hippodrome didn’t know that. And they loved the idea. Chariot races could be bloody—crashes frequent, injuries common—but true blood sports had been banned and reinstated, banned and reinstated repeatedly for the last four hundred years. They had been illegal for the last ninety or more. A licit taste of an illicit activity? A taste of a vice that the audience could blame on Parian barbarity rather than their own? It was irresistible.
But that pressure wasn’t enough. The Nuqaba didn’t mind angering fifty thousand of some other satrapy’s people. But the pressure wasn’t the bait.
Karris looked closely as the Nuqaba and Eirene Malargos bickered. She could lip-read ‘wife,’ and multiple curses. The Nuqaba nodded her head and said some words to a handsome, muscular Parian man who was still seated next to her. Then she stepped forward and raised her hands. Eirene put a hand on her arm, but the Nuqaba shook her off, giving her a poisonous glance. Eirene surrendered, trying not to make a scene, but clearly furious.
When Marissia had pitched the idea to Karris, she’d said, ‘I’ve studied Haruru for fifteen years. She’s hateful, petty, jealous, and vindictive—and she was involved with Gavin once. If she can do anything to hurt him, she will.’
And now we find out just how competent Marissia really is.
And then a sick thought punched Karris in the stomach: It’s not as if Marissia has an incentive to send me to my death.
Sudden fear shivered down Karris’s back.
Her rival.
Oh, Orholam, what have I done? I thought I’d finally won her over. I thought we shared a love for Gavin that trumped the rest. I thought she was working with me. I’ve taken everything from her, and this is her one chance to reclaim her work, if not her man, whom she knew was lost to her forever.
This is what you get for trusting a slave.
It had been a colossal blunder. The kind Karris never would have missed if she hadn’t been so pressed for time. How long had Marissia sat on that information, in order to make sure Karris was pressed for time? Marissia could have known about Gavin’s imprisonment for weeks, and held it back just so Karris would rush off and get herself killed. Even the trial by combat had been Marissia’s idea.
But the White trusts her. And she loves Gavin. She wouldn’t hold back information when he was in danger, would she?
But Gavin had pushed her aside without a thought when he’d married Karris. How would Karris react if a man had done that to her?
Orholam have mercy.
The crowd quieted, and Karris waited for the word. She would be dragged off as a co-conspirator. Alone, with no one to speak for her, all that needed to happen was for the Nuqaba to say that Karris was a madwoman, and that a trial by combat was never part of Parian history. There would be those in this vast crowd who knew that was true.
It was all falling apart.
“It has been many, many years since the trial by combat has been requested,” the Nuqaba said. And Karris’s heart soared. She had a chance. “As set down in our ancient laws, the trial by combat can only be requested once, and must be fulfilled by the one who asked for it. No champions!”