Chapter 6 The Duelist's Yard

The dueling yard was the loudest place in the academy, and Maya had learned to hate it. Every afternoon the students gathered there, in the ring of blue lamps that held back the permanent dusk, and they paired off, and they fought. Not with swords or fists. With shadows. The older students had shadow-fighters, dark shapes that rose off the floor and struck at each other like living things, and the first-years stood at the edge of the ring and watched, and tried to look like they were learning something. Maya watched the way she watched everything now, from the far side of the yard, alone, with the careful empty space around her that the other students had learned to keep. There was a boy in her year who was better than everyone. She had noticed him on the first day, and she had been trying not to notice him ever since. He was tall and quiet, and he moved through the drills like the drills were made for him, and his shadow was the fastest thing in the yard. It was not a fighter's shadow, not the big broad shape the older students made. It was thin and quick, and it moved like water, and it was never where you expected it to be. His name was Cassian, and the other students kept their distance from him the same way they kept their distance from her, only more so. She had heard the rumors about him, the same way he had probably heard the rumors about her. He had arrived with no family, no record, no explanation, and he had never told anyone where he came from. He collected secrets the way other students collected grades, and he was not cruel about it, and that made it stranger. He was watching her. She felt it the way she felt the lamp light, a pressure at the edge of her awareness, and when she looked up he was standing across the yard with his arms crossed, watching her the way you watch a puzzle you intend to solve. The instructor that afternoon was not Seraphina. It was a hard-faced woman named Mistress Darrow, who believed that shadow-work was battle and that battle was the only honest thing there was. She had been watching Maya too, and when the drills ended she did not dismiss the first-years. She pointed at Maya, and then at Cassian, and she said, "You two. In the ring." The yard went quiet. Maya felt the students make room, felt the attention turn to her like a light, felt her shadow stir at her feet as if it could smell what was coming. "I don't want to fight," she said. "No one ever does," said Mistress Darrow. "That's not what the ring is for. The ring is for finding out what you are. You're the girl whose shadow ate the lamps. He's the boy no one can touch. I want to see which one of you is real." So Maya stepped into the ring, and Cassian stepped into the ring across from her, and the blue lamps burned, and the permanent dusk pressed down on them from above like a lid. "Don't hold back," Cassian said. It was the first time she had heard his voice, and it was not what she had expected. It was quiet, and it was certain, and it sounded like a man who had learned long ago that the only thing worth saying was the truth. "I don't know how to not hold back," Maya said. "I don't know what I'm doing." "Yes you do," he said. "Your shadow does. Let it." He moved. His shadow came off the floor like a whip, and it crossed the ring in a line of darkness so fast it was there before Maya had finished seeing it move. She threw up her hand, and her shadow rose to meet it, and the two darknesses met in the middle of the ring with a sound like cloth tearing. And then something happened that had never happened before. Maya's shadow stopped obeying her. It did not stay in the shape she had given it. It changed, the way it had changed in the practice hall, and it grew, and it took a shape she had not chosen, a shape she had never seen before, and it went through Cassian's defense like it was not there. It did not hurt him. That was the strange part. It could have. It crossed the ring, and his shadow was fast, and hers was faster, and it passed him close enough to touch, and then it was past him, and it stood between him and the lamp, a tall dark shape with folded wings, casting the whole yard into shadow. The yard was silent. Maya stood at the center of it, shaking, and her shadow was not where her feet were. It was across the ring, standing over Cassian like a guardian, like a thing that had decided, without being asked, that he was not the enemy. Cassian looked up at it. He did not look afraid. He looked at the dark shape, and then he looked at Maya, and his eyes were bright with something she could not read. "So it's true," he said quietly. "You're carrying something that isn't yours." Mistress Darrow ordered them apart, and the drill moved on, and the students took their shadows and their silence back to their corners, and Maya stood in the middle of the yard and felt the distance around her grow, the careful empty space that people keep around things that might burn. It was wider now than it had been an hour ago, and she knew it would not shrink. Cassian came to her before he left, and he stood closer than the others would stand, and he said, "I've been watching that window every night. The one at the end of the west corridor. Nothing ever moves in it. But I have a feeling you're going to move it soon." "What window?" Maya asked. He did not answer. He looked at her for a long moment, and then he said, "Whatever you're carrying, you didn't choose it. But you're going to have to decide what to do with it. That's the thing about power, Maya. It doesn't care where it came from. It only cares what you do with it." He walked away, and Maya stood alone in the middle of the emptying yard, and her shadow lay at her feet again, flat and ordinary, as if nothing had happened at all. ---