This was going…well. Tenatively well, and Kedrick would take any measure of well that he could get his hands on. Honestly, the woman agreeing to hike out to this side of the city and meet him in a casino restaurant was already a huge enough gesture that any sign of vague interest she showed during the dinner he would take as above-and-beyond interest. The only issue was that she wasn’t showing all that much interest.

  Kedrick Kane, nearly nine feet of solid man and muscle, held his menu between two fingers in his left hand and squinted down at the tiny words scrawled across the fine cardstock page. He had no need to read it; he came here often enough to have it memorized. Though the restaurant attempted to keep the noise of the games in the casino beyond the curtain of crimson velvet draped unnoticeably quiet, he noticed everything. To him, a third rank magician, he felt as if he was standing next to those irritating works of enchantment as their whistles and jingling bells drove into his skull like needles. The violinist in the corner of the austere eatery of white tabletops, heavy red drapery, and platinumware could only do so much. What little help she did in keeping the drone away was appreciated, and Kedrick thought he might tip her a field for helping him to focus.

  And why shouldn’t he focus? Every time he glanced up from his menu, he couldn’t help but smile to himself. Yidris had said that his cousin was gorgeous when he arranged the blind date, and while Kedrick didn’t so much like the idea of anyone calling their cousin gorgeous, Yidris hadn’t been lying. Selza Maet, a stonespeaker woman, looked like volcanic glass cut from the earth and given the form of an angel. Her eyes shone with white light, a natural quirk of hers, and the way she ran her finger along the side of her eye as she tried to rub sleep away was somehow graceful. Kedrick had never thought anyone could yawn gracefully, but Selza managed it.

  “You look…hungry.” Kedrick knew it was the wrong thing to say even as his mouth was speaking the words.

  “I look hungry?” Selza glanced up from her own menu and eyed him. “What do you mean by that? Are you saying that I am too thin or too thick? Which one?”

  “No, not hungry. Of course not. You are perfectly proportioned. Exactly the right amount…” He paused when he saw her laughing. “You’re teasing me.”

  “Maybe a bit. You’re not wrong. I am hungry. Was a madhouse to get to this side of town tonight. Every time I catch the Faeth riding in their private little lane, I just want to shake them. Not that I could fit in it. People call Faeth huge, but I tend to find the opposite is true.”

  “Exactly, right,” Kedrick replied, jumping on one of his favorite rant topics. “Half the doors in this city I have to duckwalk through or crouch under. It is like the designers thought that elves were the biggest people around.”

  “I’ve developed a constant ache from having to bend over to hear people,” Selza agreed, rubbing the middle of her back with a hand. “I already have back issues.”

  “At least you are a foot or more closer to them,” Kedrick said. “I never really thought about how dealing with different folks of different sizes might be, let’s say, limiting, before I left the clan. Not to be crude, but I am near five times the size of most of the women in this city. Sure, it was fun the first few times, but after a while, the problems begin to outweigh the novelty.”

  Selza arched a brow at that. “That was you trying to not be crude?”

  “A little too far?” Kedrick slid his wine flute toward the waiter when he returned to top off their drinks. He gave the man his usual order. “I haven’t had a date in a while.”

  “You said that I could order anything?” Selza asked.

  “Of course.”

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  “Then, I might let it pass.”

  Kedrick relaxed into silence as the woman began to order. He was quickly discovering that his comment about her being hungry was more accurate than he knew.

  Just as she was putting in her third entree order, Kedrick felt a hand fall on his shoulder. A man whispered in his ear as he slid a metal case onto the empty porcelain plate sitting in front of Kedrick. After the man disappeared, his message delivered, Kedrick closed his eyes and sighed to himself. His chair groaned as he pushed it back along the polished wooden floor.

  “Felix, get the lady anything she wants. It looks like I will need to leave early.”

  The lights inside the tower continued to flash as Dovik approached a window. His last glove squeezed tight along his knuckles as he pulled it on. The protective enchantments of his gear pressed into him, warming him, making him feel much better than he had a few minutes ago. In the armory on this floor of the tower, he had found all of his equipment neatly stowed away inside a locker. Well, all of his equipment other than his storage ring. That was gone, but the contents were left inside the locker. Lucky him.

  With a grunt of effort, Dovik bent and lifted the locker onto his shoulder. A cascade of bottles rattled around inside as he settled it. Throwing a bunch of unstable potions into a storage ring was no issue, but if such concoctions decided to mix inside the metal box he carried, many bad things could happen. A part of him was interested to see exactly what would happen, but he had had enough of gambling as of late. Just as he was preparing to kick the glass out of the window and start scaling down the side of the tower, he paused, his foot still raised.

  Below, armed men were moving back and forth in the courtyard in front of the tower. None were all that threatening to Dovik, especially when he was armed, but one man stood apart from the rest.

  With two armed figures flanking him, that bastard dwarf who had stabbed him full of icy holes was being led out of the front entrance. There were manacles binding his hands behind his back, but Dovik trusted those to restrain the rank-three about as much as he thought soggy bread could.

  The man was led away from the tower, gentle as a lamb, and escorted into one of the sleek, black ships that were parked out front. As the ship began to rise and move off into the sky, Dovik got a bad feeling in his gut. He needed to find out where that man was going, and he had a good notion that he already knew. Charlene was in danger.

  The break between the third and fourth-ranked fighters is the longest I have experienced in the arena. By the time that Galla begins to call out the third-highest-ranked fighter that Mox plans to put me against, half the crowd has already left to take care of other business. At the sound of the elven woman’s voice, they come flooding back.

  I don’t even have to try to ignore the woman anymore. I wonder briefly if that is how all the fighters in this arena feel.

  At first, I am reminded of the first match that I had with the man wearing the ridiculous costume, as a pair of long antennae begins to poke from the stone. That notion is quickly corrected.

  I’ve only ever met one before, but what comes walking from the light is a manakith woman, a waspwoman. Her insectile features blend in a genuinely enchanting way into her humanoid form. Unlike the manakith male whom I met so long ago in Maidenlake, there are practically no human features to her face. When I would have heard waspwoman before, the triangular head containing two sets of multi-fasciated black eyes and two distinct mandibles is precisely what I might have pictured. Two sets of arms stem from her torso, each hand decorated with six claw-like fingers. Despite what I might assume, the wings slowly unfurling behind her appear more like those of a butterfly–long and sleek fiberous constructs of white, orange, and black. Her soft fur followed the same pattern, the black and white dots of the wings slowly morphing to a pattern of rings that run down her front and her limbs in a hypnotic pattern.

  “Mistress!” Galea cries in my ear loud enough to make me flinch.

  I blink, taking a step back. When I first saw this woman, everyhing left me, sound, touch, awareness of the world. She was doing something to me just by looking at her. Maybe I was taking the arena a little too casually. I identify my opponent.

  Princess Nyn Whitegast, Daughter of Queen Nat Whitegast.

  “A princess,” I whisper.

  “Yes,” Galea says, nodding at my side. “It would appear that way.”

  “I’m dead.”

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