The noisy spectators, the wide blue sky, the dusty heat penetrating my throat: they spur me on as I balance and swing through rope and beam and bar and trap.
More quickly than I expected I find myself poised on a narrow beam looking down on the tipping bridge, which I have to cross next. Sandstorm still clings there, upside down with his back almost touching the ground and his jacket stained with sweat. From his furious look I realize he hoped the tipping bridge would be the bottleneck and that he could stop all of us from crossing by hanging there.
Except there is another way across the gap for an adversary bold enough to make a leap from the narrow beam to a slightly less narrow platform, high enough up and far enough away that if you miss you will hurt and maybe kill yourself. I calculate how much speed and arc I will need to get across the gap, and then I catch his eye, him all helpless caught up in the wobbling rope ladder. His glare wishes me crashed on the ground all bloody and broken. His fingers are turning white as he clings to the rope bridge.
“Kiss off, Adversary,” I call down. The blood flows high in me. “I’ll show you how a real adversary does it.”
The height of my starting point gives me momentum and opportunity. I throw a somersault into my leap, knees tucked and unfolding as I hit a perfect landing, the kind that doesn’t even jar.
The crowd roars.
The rest of Traps flies past as if I truly have spun a web through it. The approbation of the crowd lifts my feet. I show off, which is always a danger because you’re more likely to miss, but I no longer care. I can’t fall.
When I reach the resting platform I see no sign of Firecat, but I catch a glimpse of Kalliarkos clambering down from Rivers and therefore headed for Pillars. I drop to the dirt and run for Trees, hearing the chime of a gate bell. He’s still ahead of me.
My plain brown mask has slipped a little, and as I pause to adjust it I risk a quick look at the royal balcony. It’s too high and far away for me to see faces clearly, but the king and queen lounge on a grand sofa under umbrellas held by servants. On a lower level of the balcony, at their feet, sits the man who won the victory at Maldine. I would know my father anywhere by the way he holds his back and head confidently upright. The honor shown him today takes my breath away. If only Mother were here to celebrate it with him.
On Garon Palace’s balcony they stand silent, watching.
I chalk my sweating hands again and enter Trees.
Immediately I run into Firecat. To enter this configuration of Trees you have to jump up, catch hold of a bar, and swing up into a nest of climbing poles on a second level. Firecat is so short she’s having trouble reaching the bar.
The crowd cheers and whistles as an exciting maneuver happens in Pillars or Traps.
“Salutations, Adversary,” I say politely.
She snarls at me. “Usually they offer a lower climbing entrance that eats up time. There’s no way I can jump that high. It’s like they want someone taller than me to win.”
Because of betting scandals in which one adversary threw a trial to another in exchange for a share of the winnings, King Kliatemnos the Third proclaimed that any act of cooperation or interference among the adversaries will be punishable by expulsion. So I say nothing.
The bar is so high it takes me four tries to catch it for long enough to draw up my knees to my belly and hook them over the bar. After that it is no trouble to get onto the second level and its tangle of climbing. Before I head in, I look down.
“Kiss off, Adversary,” I say with a sympathetic shake of my head.
For all her anger, she gives me a grudging smile and that flick of the finger to the chin.
This configuration of Trees uses a great deal of technically difficult climbing up perpendicular faces with handholds, or hold-less climbing between posts like in the air shaft. Scraping my back against polished wood, feet braced in tension against a post set opposite, I work up several sets of blind shafts. After escaping the tomb it just doesn’t seem that hard.
As I’m climbing up to the resting platform, shaking a cramp out of my left hand, a bell rings from the direction of Traps. Kalliarkos is still ahead of me. But he has to get past Sandstorm, who for all I know is still blocking the bottleneck of the tilting bridge.
Will Kalliarkos dare to leap?
Rivers runs dry. Stepping stones are scattered across a sandy pit instead of a watery channel. The trick is that there are false stones scattered through the true ones that look stable but won’t take weight. Anise taught us to look at all the clues: The way the sand is scuffed around certain stones tells me where others have slipped off. The sand around the stable stones lies unmarked. By taking time to examine the ground before I start, I make it across in one go. And because I want Father to see how good I really am, I add a flip at the very end, from the last stone to the “shore.”