The thong of the man’s sandal hung broken, his knife taken by the wind and surely lying somewhere behind her. And yet she could not see it. Someone in the crowd must have taken it.

“The fight is over,” the man said. “She’s injured.”

His voice cracked through their dizzying exchange and Aea looked from the crowd to the man, apprehension leaking into her belly to flood away the mirth. Gradually, the air no longer felt warm, but stifling, the sun no longer bright but overbearing. As the vortex of laughter and music fell away from her ears, it was replaced with the buzz of drunken voices.

She studied the man, once the only true and moving thing in her focus, the crowd surrounding him no longer a undulating mass of shadow, but now rife with color and feature. She and he were no longer inside a quiet world of their making. He'd broken the spell.

Aea worried her lower lip between her teeth and her eyes darted to the ground. The sensation of being bare crept into her chest and pushed her hammering heart low beneath her ribs. It seemed that instead of the man being slightly annoyed because he had something of import to attend, he truly found this a waste of time to such a degree that he was offering her injury as if it were a valid reason to end the match.

She was not unfamiliar with such sentiments. Bold of a stranger to barb her with such contempt considering she hadn't offered him insult or injury.  

Such audacity coaxed Aea's annoyance past her initial embarrassment and she narrowed her eyes at the man. Her heart no longer struggled to claw up from the base of her chest but soared and thumping an unassailable rhythm to pump her blood full of vexed warmth.

“Sir, the fight is over until someone surrenders or is beaten in the three rounds. 'T'would be an insult to the fighters' honor if surrender was called in their stead," the ringmaster said.

Aea cocked an eyebrow and her lips, once bowed with a spirited half-smile, stretched into a line of displeasure. She forced her arm back into its socket and rubbed the tender muscle as it moulded and burned, solidifying in its rightful place where once it had been as free as flowing magma.

The man winced and she huffed through her nostrils. He could grimace, he could complain, he could offer excuse, but what he could not do was leave. Not until she was finished with him. If he'd been less rude and explained that—truly, he did not wish for this and he had some place to be—she would have yielded and ended the match because she was the challenger and so it was her duty to take the submission if she'd miscalculated.

But that is not what happened. Instead, he attempted to heft his wish to leave upon her as if she were the deciding factor and not him. She did not think her company or her competition were that contemptible, nor did he strike her as particularly dishonest, but she'd been wrong plenty of times before. Then again, she supposed he hadn't exactly spoken at length for her to judge his penchant for veiled presentations.

In any case, the match would continue to its conclusion unless he wanted to forfeit.

Slowly, Aea retracted Agogos’ signal and approached the man. The expression of displeasure vanished from her face, replaced instead with a neutral mask. So very used to hiding her thoughts and emotions from men who would backhand her for it. So very tired of arrogant men always getting their way.

“How effortless life would be if injury were just cause for respite,” she intoned.

When she entered this mad gathering only half an hour past, her spirit lifted and took wing. She tasted curiosity, disbelief, and amusement as she was transported into this new world of the fascinatingly absurd. It felt like being a child again, discovering some new valley, some new tree nook where she might find refuge from reality. This man had received her relaxation for simply existing within such a fantastical realm.

Now, in exchange for his insult, he would have Aea’s enthusiasm.

She stretched the scarf between her hands, the dull coolness of the hard ground centering her concentration and allowing disregard for everyone else save for the man before her. Her eyes darted all over his face. It shone with health, not sweat, and his skin was free of mar. That he sustained not so much as a scratch while her arm hung nearly useless at her side bothered her. That he did not seem angry in the least for her troubles bothered her more. He did not even breathe heavier. It was as if she were attacking a block of stone. 

In fact...he was quite like a stone. Or perhaps a mountain. Calm and still as a lake, short of word and reactive. Marble made flesh. Tranquil. Inconvenient. If everything she’d done thus far would not rouse him to commit a wrathful mistake, nothing would. She knew well that still waters ran deep as Kaia and Agolois oft demonstrated, so it was not that he did not feel...it was only his control held stronger.

Perhaps he was simply so large that others gave him what he wanted more often than not. Aea could imagine the lightest frown from him would be worth a dozen snarling lions. If one did not need to convey emotion to relieve the symptom of displeasure, one did not have need to express them.

An interesting hypothesis, and utterly useless to her at the moment.

Aea sucked in a steady breath and counted back from ten, anchoring herself with his apathetic serenity and bringing her indignation to heel. She never knew such calmness could exist in a mortal. It was disarming and she did not quite know what to make of such a discovery outside of allowing herself to be surprised by it. Gradually, her temper, fueled mostly by humiliation and injury to her honor, cooled from a simmer to placidity.

And then she was calm once more. 

“Do not worry Solstråle, should you get hurt, rest assured I will not presume to know whether you can continue on. After all, you are neither child nor invalid and can clearly make such autonomous decisions without my assistance.” She spoke without irony coloring her voice, the tone remaining expectant and unimpressed at his disregard. The fact that she named him something he could not possibly translate assisted in allowing the playful spirit of competition to chase away the last vestiges of severity’s spector.

There was time enough for all manner of gravity later, and the next day, and the next, and all days after. Today, she wished to have an adventure and she wished to eat because her belly was on the brink of aching. She would have what she wanted, and so there was no need to sour such a novel day.

The man—Solstråle in lieu of a name—held his hands up, almost raised to block her but not quite. His legs, long and sturdy, kept him balanced in a concrete stance. A bull would be hard pressed to knock him over. Aea wondered what was going through his mind, what he thought she’d do. She was almost inclined to stretch the moment to see how he reacted to apprehension, but no—theirs was not such a methodical and leisurely dance as that.

She glanced away from him, around him, searching for her winged conduit. Agogos spotted her, spotted her signal, and soared. Swift as an arrow, he glided over the crowd then over Aea’s opponent. Solstråle tilted his face to the heavens and just as Aea moved to throw her scarf, a large hand whipped toward her and took the braid hostage.

His ability to move so acutely and decisively, quicker than a thought, startled Aea. She had no time to appreciate his ability to observe, predict, and execute because Agogos was suddenly upon them. His arrival came as a shrieking and battering mass of onyx, and then the world sped past her comprehension. One moment she stood with her signal and the next, she flew.

Long practiced in staying silent in all matters of violence, she had never been airborne before and the unfamiliarity cracked her strict conditioning. A hard impact slammed into her belly and her wind rode out on a shout, the pitch and volume siphoned from her lungs until her voice dissolved into a breathless cry of shock. She hit something soft and her bird’s scream tore through her ears. The man’s face blurred past and suddenly, the ground fast approached.

Still she held fast to her scarf, preservation and adrenaline fueling her iron grasp. So did the man.

Her face snapped aside, her shoulder turned in, and her injured arm exploded in a white-hot pain that dulled the new ache of her cheek as she bounced against the hard floor. Tears sprung to the corners of her eyes even as she rolled aside on impact.

The man still held fast to the scarf, as did she.

Muscle memory controlled her as she rolled and pivoted at the hip, her bare feet pushing at the ground and spinning her into a backward kneel. One, two, three, swift movements and her knees slammed against Solstråle's wrists as they stretched above his head. The movement took but a breath. She bore down and though his arms could bare her weight, no mortal wrist could lift an entire body without injury.

Aea twisted the scarf about his palms, dexterous and practiced hands looping and pulling and tucking until the man’s hands were tightly but haphazardly knotted above his head. Her mind turned outward, past the man, a dangerous thing, and did not re-focus until she saw her raven arc in the corner of her vision like lightning. She pivoted again, vision hyper-sharp, arm thrumming, stomach throbbing, cheek smarting. She imagined the food she would have after this, the excess funds she might bury and dig up later to purchase an escape for she and her cousin.

She slung her body astride his, knees rubbing raw against the stone, and swung a leg over his torso. Aea clenched her teeth and tucked her tongue behind them, wedged her bare feet between his sides and the ground before locking her thighs tight to him. He wouldn’t be bucking her off, grabbing her, grappling her, or punching her now.

Agogos’s shadow darted and dipped on the hard ground around them, likely confused at the movement and smart enough not to adhere to his cue and take a second battering.

Muscles coiled, elbow bent, fist clenched, Aea twisted at the waist and let fly her sideswipe, his jaw set dead in her sights. It was clear to her now that not only could she not pull his temper out of him, she also could not get him into a submissive hold to force a yield. And so, there was nothing left but to knock him unconscious...

“I yield.”

Her muscles spasmed and just as her knuckles were set to kiss his skin, they veered off-course and she lost balance. All the weight she put behind the strike had nowhere to go but forward and the movement ended with a palm splayed against his chest, a fist pressed to her opposing ear, and a shoulder searing with a reminder to be gentle.

All stilled save for her breath. It speared through her lungs and flew from her parted lips quickly, coaxing her chest to rise and fall with exertion like the swift swells of the storm-brewed sea as her heart knocked a canter against her bones. What?

She blinked down at her opponent. He stared up at her, his expression unmoving. Her eyebrows furrowed, realization clicking into place, and she could have punched him anew in that moment. He yielded. He fucking yielded. He didn’t have to yield to force the match to a close, he could have won it if he tried. A punch or bridge might have failed, but rolling them might have crushed her, driving a shoulder to her throat could force her surrender, headbutting her might have knocked her back or unconscious. It would have taken as much time to do any of those things as it did for him to call a forfeit.

So why didn’t he?

He could have tried to win, and he may not have, but he may have as well. But he didn’t attempt to see which, he just…gave up. Why?.

Aea’s eyes darted all over his stoic face, searching for an answer, but she found none. Her body thrummed, ready to strike. This was not how things were done. She could accept his yield and take the match—and the pot—as entirely hers. But it would be a false victory, a pacification. She could still knock him to sleep and call it a fair win, and she could take the pot still. One was a choice of the wise, the other a choice of the proud.

A deep frown pulled her eyebrows and lips down. The man still hadn’t moved and in her confusion, neither did she. Aea looked up and observed the crowd. They, too, seemed less than thrilled with the man’s call. Her eyes sought his again and she slowly lowered her fist to her side. Aea studied him for some long moments, running through suspicion, confusion, exasperation, suspicion again, and finally resolved on decision. A tick flexed at her jaw.

“I yield,” she said.

A choice of the stupid, it seemed, was in order. She would have enough to eat and hide away, there was no reason to need the whole pot for anything, and excess funds weren’t worth the cost of guilt or fraud. Nobody was watching her to judge her decisions, so she was free to make them as she liked.

Aea pulled her feet from beneath him and stood up, her perplexed frown never vanishing. Beads of sweat came away from her brow as she wiped her forearm across her skin. Her heart hadn’t slowed yet, nor her breath. As she stepped over him, her hip warmed and the rest of her new aches followed. Fingers pressed to her cheek, she made her way to the ringmaster in a daze.

The noise and form of the crowd meant less than nothing to her. Truly, she did not even mind her step or direction. One moment she stood clear across the ring from the money and the next she emptied the cup’s contents into the stiff hide pouch knotted to her waist. Dozens of heavy clinks pinged from the pouch to her belly and if she had not been contemplating still, she might have grown excited.

Instead, she thrust the cup back at the ringmaster and turned to find her disorienting opponent. Half the winnings were fairly his, and though the idea of giving money away should have been an unthinkable prospect, her wish for him to have it was a natural thing. After all, if he left without it, then her yield wouldn’t be a true one. Just empty words. She wanted him to have his half because she wanted to keep her dignity. He couldn’t force her to take such a counterfeit.

There was honor in losing when exerting a true attempt. Nothing but disgrace and pity lived in the heart of charity.

The large man was not difficult to spot and when her focus locked onto him, her body followed the target until she stepped double-time to reach him. She unknotted the epiblema fasted round her hair and reached into her pouch to grasp half its weight, tossing it into the threadbare linen before tying it into a loose bag. Still confused, equally as irritated, she was not ready to quit his presence until she resolved his miscalculated attempt at whatever he was attempting.

“Solstråle,” she intoned. Her nostrils flared and she tossed the pouch into her other grip before clamping a hand to his forearm to gain his attention if not his irritation. The cloth was clumsily forced into his palm and she drew back just as swiftly as she joined him. Aea had plenty to say to him, plenty to ask, but if her limited time in his company was any indication of his willingness to provide a word, she would not gain his audience or his answers.

If he did not want to give them, then that was his decision, and she would not try and steal them. That is what she told herself in the privacy of her mind even as her mouth opened to ask him why. She shut her mouth with a frown, then opened it once more because she couldn’t stop the impulse despite the improbability of a satisfying answer.

“Why did you do that?”