For two heartbeats the two men stood three feet apart in the center of the ruined circle. The scarred, forty-two-year-old Bronze master with roof dust on his shoulder and his hand on his iron handle. The twenty-two-year-old Flame fighter with blood drying down his left ribs and both palms seared into red-and-black ruin at his sides.
Before Seyun could answer Daro’s demand to re-hang the cage from the western beam, heavy leather boots thudded down the wooden steps from the southern podium.
Mother Renn didn’t walk like an old woman. She crossed the blue flat stone slabs with the broad, flat-backed weight of someone who had thrown two-hundred-pound grain sacks and hotheaded dock wrestlers out of her pit for forty winters. She stepped directly between Seyun and Daro Kesh, planting the iron metal ring of her oak staff on the stone seam three inches from the fallen brass lantern-cage.
She didn’t pitch her voice for a private conference. She spoke loud enough that every cooper on the northern benches, every student on the southern tier. Examiner Vael leaning over the eastern gallery rail heard every word.
“We’ll not hang the box from the western beam,” Mother Renn said flatly. She looked first at Daro and then at Seyun. “And we’ll not pretend the last thirty-three breaths didn’t happen so two proud men can hit each other until one of them faints. Look at the floor between your boots, both of you.”
