Chapter 30. The Pit

My heart had not slowed down since we’d left the round white room.

My father walked half a pace ahead of me while I followed and kept my eyes forward the way I’d been trained to, but my eyes wanted to be everywhere at once, because we were going somewhere I had never been.

I knew this estate. I knew it the way you know a house you’ve spent sixteen years inside, which is to say I knew the parts of it I’d been permitted to know, and I had assumed, without ever quite thinking about it, that the permitted parts were most of it. They were not. We passed through a colonnade I’d never seen, open on one side to a drop I couldn’t gauge, and then down a wide shallow stair cut from a paler stone than the granite I was used to, and then along a corridor that curved for so long I lost the sense of which direction the estate was behind me.

“You are quiet,” my father said.

“I’m looking.”

He seemed to like that answer. He didn’t say so. He just kept walking, then he started to talk, and I understood after a moment that he was showing me the place.

That building there was the old records house, he said, where the branch families kept their genealogies before the practice was centralized. The tower past it had been a signal tower once, in the days when the house had needed to speak to its bannermen across the valley by light. The long low hall with the tiled roof was where the disciples took their meals. There were many disciples. Thousands of them, he said, all of them top tier warriors, with many mages among them.

I had known the estate was large. I’d walked out of it a week ago through gates I hadn’t known existed, past training grounds I hadn’t known existed, and I’d promised myself I would stop being surprised by the size of the place I’d been born in.

Alas, I was surprised again.

“You’ll leave for Sartheon soon,” my father said. “A full year, before your first leave. Longer, if the terms fall the wrong way.”

“Yes, father.”

I hid the excitement in my voice at the mention of this.

“A boy of your name does not simply get into a carriage and go.” He said. “The house has to mark it. Anything less would be an insult to what you are, and the house does not insult itself.”

So there was a ceremony.

I… I did not particularly want thousands of people to look at me and decide what they thought.

But my father was walking ahead of me showing me his home, and something in the way he’d said it, told me complaining would not go over the way I wanted it to. So I didn’t.

“…Thank you, Father.”

“Hm.”

We turned another corner, the corridor opened, and the sound reached me before the sight did.

There were voices. A great many of them, too far off to separate into anything, layered into one low continuous roar that came from ahead of us and filled the corridor. My steps slowed without my telling them to.

“You feel that,” my father said. “Good. Come.”

The corridor gave onto open air, and I stopped.

I had thought the gates of House Aridis were the largest thing the house owned. I’d stood in front of them a week ago and felt small. I had been wrong, and I understood the extent of my mistake the moment the thing ahead of us came into view, because the gates of House Aridis would have fit inside the gate we were now walking toward with room left over on every side.

Two vast dark shapes rose against the sky, curved and swelling, and for a second my mind refused them and read them as hills, low black hills flanking the mouth of something enormous. Then the proportions settled and I understood they were doors. The material was black and depthless, obsidian or something that wanted me to think it was, and it drank the afternoon light instead of throwing it back, so that the only thing on the whole surface that caught the sun was the gryphon.

The gryphon of the house had been worked into the black across both doors at a scale I had no frame for. One wing alone would have covered the front of my wing of the estate. The beast reared with its wings spread the way it always did, over every gate and every crest and every tile I’d ever knelt on.

And the sound was coming from behind it.

“This,” my father said, “is the Pit.”

I didn’t say anything. I was looking up.

“Our forefather, Durhain I, raised it four thousand years ago, after he took this valley from the giants and the evil spirits that had held it since before men had a word for the place.” He’d stopped beside me, looking up at it too, with obvious pride. “There is a larger one in the world. One. The Crown’s, at the capital. Everything after that is smaller than what you are looking at.”

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I finally found my voice.

“What is it for?”

“Battles.” He said pleasantly. “You see, the great houses do not go to war with one another. We are one kingdom under one crown, and open war between us is forbidden.”

He looked at me.

“But men are men, Howl. Every house wants to know it stands above the rest. So a long time ago we agreed on a way to prove it that doesn’t burn a single field, and we called it the Dance. Once every four years, every house that matters sends its finest fighters to one arena, and they compete. The kingdom comes to watch. The allied kingdoms come too, kings and their courts, envoys from across the sea, anyone worth inviting. On its face it is the grandest entertainment in the world. Underneath it, it is how the houses settle their ranking. When the last match is done, everyone knows who is first, who is second, and who is nothing, and that ranking holds for four years, until the next one.

The Dance…

I looked up at him.

“Is that what the Pit is for? The Dance?”

He chuckled.

“It is. Though not in a long while.” He let his eyes travel up the black doors. “Every four years a different house holds it in their own arena before the whole world. It is an honor most houses will never be trusted with, and a house that hosts poorly is not asked again.”

I hadn’t known any of this. How come I was not told something this incredible?

“When did we last host?”