Chapter 32. Seeds of Rebellion

The whole Pit gasped at once as I was taken off the ground and the fingers were closing.

But a second into the grab, I cast.

I did not choose it so much as reach for the nearest spell out of instinct. A bubble of compressed air formed around me, sealing the gap between my body and the troll’s fist, and I felt the fingers press against it, trying to crush it flat.

So I poured mana into it.

The bubble pushed back against the grip, and I fed it more, and then more, until it strained at the fingers holding it in and there was nowhere left for all that pressure to go.

Then I let it burst.

BOOM!

The blast tore the troll’s hand open and threw the whole massive body backward off its feet. It flew halfway across the Pit, arm still curled around the empty space where I’d been, hit the sand hard, rolled twice, and came to rest in a heap.

I dropped to my feet in the spot where it had held me a second before.

The crowd gasped, then broke into applause that climbed the tiers until the whole Pit thundered with it.

The troll lay in the churned sand across the Pit, propped on one long arm, its head swaying, blinking at the ground as if it could not work out how it had gotten there.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

It did not hear me. I knew it did not. The applause was too loud and it was thirty feet away and half-stunned, but I said it anyway.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you. You just… you grabbed me, and I—”

Howl.

I stopped.

I heard my father’s voice inside my own head, which took me a full second to understand.

So I looked up.

He was still in the air over the arena, hands behind his back, but the smile was gone, replaced by a coldness I had not known him capable of. When the voice came again it was very quiet, and it did not sound warm at all.

Stop playing with it. End it now. You are the Axiom of House Aridis, not a buffoon.

“Father, I…”

My words went nowhere. With all the people roaring over me, my father thirty feet up, and me not knowing how to speak into someone’s head the way he’d just done. But I tried anyway.

“The troll, father, the troll isn’t—”

“RAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!”

It was already up and running, coming at me low and fast, that whole huge body eating the distance in a few strides.

“Wait!”

I stomped, sending mana down through my heel and out along the floor of the Pit in a straight line. It raced out ahead of me as a seam in the sand, streaking toward the troll, and the instant it reached the ground under its front foot, I opened it.

The sand erupted upward under the troll in a single column, a great fountain of it blasting straight into the air, and the troll went up with it. All of that mass, lifted off the ground and flung skyward, limbs wheeling, the roar cut short into a confused bark as the floor simply left it.

I cast a Levitation spell before it could come down and the troll stopped twenty feet up, held.

The weight of it settled onto me through the spell. Levitation spells always cost you a share of what you lifted, never the whole of it but never little either, something close to half the true weight pressing back on the caster, and the troll was heavier than anything I had ever tried to hold.

It bore down at the base of my skull and through my shoulders as I flooded my body with reinforcement to carry it, braced my legs, and held.

The troll hung in the open air over the Pit with nothing under its feet and nothing to reach. It thrashed, but that took it nowhere. Its arms clawed at the air, but that was all for nothing.

The fight was over. It couldn’t reach the ground, or me, or anything else. All it could do was hang there, turning slowly, making the same sound over and over.

End it.

My father’s voice resonated in my head once again.

I was looking at the troll. It was twenty feet over my head, kicking at nothing, and then its eyes rolled down and found me. They fixed on my face, same as they had the moment the shackles came off, and there was too much behind them. An animal did not look at you like that. It understood where it was, it understood what came next, and it was afraid.

End it, Howl.

The crowd had found a rhythm. Chanting something, my name or the house name, I couldn’t tell anymore, stamping it into the tiers. Do it, do it, do it. And under it, in my own skull, my father. End it. End it. And above me the troll, turning in the air, mouth open, still screaming RAAAAAAAAAARGH!

It was too much at once. My thoughts kept coming apart before I could finish them. I wanted them to stop, to listen, to understand that the thing hanging over my head was afraid yet not one person here cared. The chanting, the voice in my skull, the screaming, all of it climbing over each other and pressing down and getting louder, and I only wanted quiet, just for a second, just long enough to be heard.

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End it now, son.

“NO!”

The mana went into my voice on purpose. The word tore out of my throat and swelled, one syllable filling the whole bowl of the Pit, rolling up the tiers, coming off the far wall and going further still.

And everything went silent.

I stood in the middle of it all, my heart going like a hammer, knowing I might get in trouble for this, but I no longer cared. I did not lower my voice.

More importantly, I let the mana stay in it for all of them to hear me at last.

“What is wrong with all of you?”

It rolled up the tiers, and I watched the front rows flinch back from it.

“Look at it!”

They looked at the struggling troll.