Page 90 of Immortal Longings
Calla stills. Anton moves, and she almost crumples to her knees, taking the cut right across her chest. He controlled his attack. It wasn’t meant to be a killing blow; it was only meant to hurt.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says.
Anton makes another cut. He asks, “What has Talin ever done for you?” This attempt, at least, Calla swivels from, letting her jacket take most of the blade. The omnipresent voice of the coliseum has risen in volume as it narrates the fight. “Why does it deserve your love?”
“It doesn’t have to do anything for me.” Calla’s breath is turning shallow. She is tiring. But she can find an opening. She knows she can. Every opponent has a weak point, the palace used to tell her. They’ll show their hand at one point or another, peeling apart their shields to welcome a killing blow. “Love isn’t deserved. It is given freely.”
Anton’s eyes flicker up. He looks at the palace, at the glorious structure that looms above them in the darkness, backlit by the glow of the coliseum.
“My dear princess,” he says. “You fight to change who sits on the throne. But I’m afraid that will not achieve what you think it might.”
Perhaps it will not be so easy once King Kasa is gone. Nevertheless, it is a start. It is more than anyone else in San-Er has ever managed to do.
Calla leans back, putting weight onto her heels. This time, she doesn’t lunge immediately. She follows Anton’s gaze, sighting August at the edge of the balcony again. He rests his elbows on the railing, shoulders braced in tension, hands clasped together. He is waiting. Waiting for Calla to finish what she said she would. What she promised she would.
Calla turns around. She blocks August from her sight.
She drops her sword.
“I can’t do this,” she rasps. Tears flood her eyes, more tears than she has letherself cry in years. They drop down her face in abundance, flowing with all the sorrow that has been tamped down.
The audience is stirring in commotion. Spectators push against the velvet rope, leaning as close as they dare to get, trying to catch whatever words are being exchanged. From above, Calla thinks she sights motion: cameras, flown overhead for the reels. She blocks it out. She blocks all of it out and sinks to her knees, too exhausted to hold herself upright.
Anton’s knives fall from his hands. He comes forward—slowly, gingerly—until he is directly before her. Both of them are stained with blood, old and fresh.
“Calla,” he says, kneeling as well. His arms come forward to wrap around her. Calla leans in, and the arena, the broadcast, the constant hum of the twin cities—everything fades away. She clutches at him and lets herself have that second, that moment of reprieve, her cheek resting on the warmth of his shoulder.
“It’s okay.” He presses his lips to her ear. “I believe in us. I believe there’s another way out.”
Calla exhales shakily, her hand tracing down his spine. All these years, hiding in the dark corners of San-Er, she has never been looking for a way out: she has been looking for a way back in.
“Anton,” she whispers. Every opponent has a weak point, the palace used to tell her. “I’m sorry.”
Here was what they taught her next. How to reach the heart from behind, so long as the blade is long enough.
She lets her dagger fall from her sleeve. She plunges the blade in.
The dagger sinks to the hilt, and Calla draws away.
Anton does not move. His expression is shocked, frozen, but he does not look surprised. He must have known that this is who he chose to love. He must have known when he first watched her play in the games, unsympathetic toward those who fell to her sword. He must have known when he learned of her trueidentity, because a past like that requires vengeance, carves a hole too deep to fill with anything less than rivers of blood.
“Calla,” he says again. This time, the pain in his voice cuts Calla deeper than any dagger through the back could, but she bears it, she bears it as his breathing shortens, as his eyes lift and desperately seek some sort of help.
None is coming.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers. Her hands clutch at his sides, at the red stain that spreads and spreads and spreads. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”
Anton’s eyes close. For a second, he seems to have stilled, rendered into a statue. Then he sways, and when Calla catches him, holding his head toward her, his breathing has already stopped.
“Anton.”
Calla sets him down. She acts in a daze. For several long seconds, she puts her hand on his chest, believing that he must be feigning the act. But the gray pallor is already setting in, the stiffness of a body with its qi extinguished.
Anton Makusa is dead. She’s truly killed him.
All around her, the coliseum starts to cheer, first at a humble magnitude, then growing to a fever pitch. They clutch one another and scream at the top of their lungs, delirious with the finality of the games. The Juedou has been won. The king’s games have a victor.
Number Fifty-Seven, the star of the scoreboards.
