"Skill, reputation, trade." Vaike glances at him. "The tournament is a showcase. Clans watch each other's warriors and assess their strength. Sometimes it leads to trades, a warrior who impresses another clan's Warlord might be offered a position, a better assignment, a promotion within a different hierarchy. It's how the clans stay competitive."
"They trade warriors the way they trade horses?"
"They trade warriors the way they trade skilled professionals who have agency over their own careers," Vaike corrects, though there is a hint of amusement beneath the correction. "Any warrior who switches clans does so willingly. The tournament simply creates the opportunity."
Evran watches the fight below. The Rendari warrior lands a clean strike to the Ashenmoor fighter's shoulder guard, and the crowd cheers. The Ashenmoor fighter recovers, resets, and comes back with a combination that drives the Rendari warrior back three paces.
"It's too bad we don't have anyone to compete," Evran says.
Vaike's mouth pulls into a smirk, slow and deliberate, and Evran recognizes it immediately as the expression that means he knows something Evran does not and is thoroughly enjoying the advantage.
"You don't think so?" Vaike says.
Evran frowns. "Do we?"
Vaike says nothing. He tilts his head toward the far end of the grounds, where the fighters are staging for the next round, and Evran follows his gaze and sees Naela standing at the edge of the ring, stripped to a fighting tunic, her blonde hair braided tight against her skull and her axes in her hands. She is rolling her shoulders, loosening up, and even from this distance Evran can see the easy, predatory grace of her movements, a body trained for violence and wearing it as naturally as breathing.
"Naela is fighting?" Evran says.
"Naela signed up for three events," Bran says from his end of the bench, and his voice brims with pride, having personally trained the warrior in question. "Axe, sword, and open melee."
"She's going to win all of them," Leona says, without looking away from the ring, delivering the assessment as fact rather than prediction.
Naela's first bout is in the axe competition. Her opponent is a Rendari warrior, a big man, heavily muscled, with a two-handed axe and the confident swagger of a previous champion. The crowd is enthusiastic, and the Rendari section stamps their feet and chants his name.
The match begins.
It is over in ninety seconds.
Naela is fast, faster than someone her size should be, and her movements have the fluid, inevitable quality of something elemental, something that cannot be blocked because it simply flows around whatever stands in its way. Her axes are extensions of her arms, spinning and striking and deflecting in patterns that look less fighting and more dancing. The Rendari warrior comes at her hard, relying on strength and reach, and Naela simply is not where his axe is. She sidesteps, pivots, deflects the heavy blade with one axe and strikes with the other, and the Rendari warrior staggers sideways and tries to recover and Naela is already there, inside his guard, one axe hooked behind his knee and the other resting lightly against his throat.
The crowd goes silent for one stunned beat, and then it erupts.
Evran is on his feet. He does not remember standing, but he is up, cheering, his hands cupped around his mouth, shouting Naela's name into the noise of the crowd. Beside him, Bran is pounding the bench with his fist and laughing. Even Leona's mouth has curved into something that is unmistakably a smile.
Naela steps back from her fallen opponent, lowers her axes, and inclines her head to the crowd. She catches Evran's eye in the stands and winks.
The sword bout is longer but no less decisive. The open melee, four fighters in the ring simultaneously, is chaos, and Naela navigates it with the patient precision of a woman who has been waiting for exactly this challenge. She takes out the first opponent in the opening exchange, lets the other two fight eachother for a minute, then steps in and finishes them both in a sequence of strikes that draws a collective gasp from the stands.
Several other clan leaders take notice. Evran watches the Ashenmoor Warlord lean toward his advisor and speak in a low voice, eyes on Naela. The Windfar Warlord is watching too, her sharp face calculating. Even Harath, who has presumably seen the best warriors in the clans for fifteen years, looks impressed.
Vaike does not seem concerned.
"They can look all they want," he says, when Evran asks if he is worried about Naela being poached. "She's been offered positions in other clans three times. She turned them all down."
"Why?"
"Because the Drakkari treat their warriors well. And because." He pauses, and the smirk returns. "She's terrified of Leona."
"I heard that," Leona says.
"It's a compliment."
Evran grins and turns back to the grounds. The bouts continue, warriors from all four clans cycling through the rings, testing themselves against each other, the crowd shifting its loyalties with the easy fickleness of spectators who appreciate good fighting regardless of the banner it serves.
Evran's gaze drifts.
He scans the crowd, the viewing platforms, the staging areas, looking for blond hair and grey-blue clothing and the easy, studied confidence of believing himself untouchable.
