‘I’m sure Nona can have a disagreement without punching anyone in the face.’ Markus returned Regol’s stare. ‘Not everyone who climbs out of the ring just steps into a bigger one.’
Regol shrugged, that mocking smile of his firmly in place. ‘The whole Corridor is a ring around Abeth, brother. And when the ice squeezes, everyone fights.’
‘Go away,’ Markus said.
Regol opened his mouth with some reply but a puzzled look overtook him. He turned to go, then spun back as if he had forgotten something.
‘You would rather be watching the fights.’ Markus spoke without emphasis but the waves of power bleeding from him shocked Nona with their intensity. It was as if someone had opened a furnace door and an unexpected wall of heat had broken across her.
Regol turned back and walked off without comment.
‘He won’t be pleased when that wears off,’ Nona said.
‘No.’ Markus nodded. ‘But it would have been worse if he’d stayed longer. He didn’t like me at all, and we both know why.’
‘Oh.’ Nona laughed, though it came out wrong. ‘Regol’s not like that. He flirts with all the girls. The ladies of the Sis practically worship—’
‘It’s you he wants, Nona. You don’t have to be an empath to know that.’
‘No, he’s just …’ She trailed off as Markus shook his head, his smile half-sad. ‘Anyway, you got rid of him easily enough.’ A twinge of disappointment had run through her at that.
‘Easily?’ Markus leaned back against the wall. ‘He put up a hell of a fight. I would never have suspected it of a Caltess brawler.’ He put his fingers to his temples. ‘I’ll probably have a headache all night …’
Nona said nothing, only glanced towards the corner. After Joeli had made Regol abandon Darla mid-fight at Sherzal’s palace the ring-fighter had asked Nona to help him. He hadn’t wanted to be manipulated like that ever again. Nona had spent hours training him to erect barriers against that kind of thread-work. He would take this defeat badly.
Nona defocused her vision and looked at Markus amid the glory of the threads, the Path’s halo. Marjal empathy was essentially thread-work that concentrated only on living threads and manipulated them more intuitively, based around emotional clusters. It was, in many senses, a tool designed for a specific job. Whereas a quantal thread-worker had ultimately more potential and flexibility, the task was always more fiddly and harder work. The threads around Markus formed a glowing aura, brighter and more dynamic than any she had seen before. The host of threads that joined him to her – some years old, some freshly formed – ran taut, shivering with possibility, unvoiced emotions vibrating along their length. Markus would read it better than she could, but he would feel the answer rather than seeing it before him in the complexity that filled the space between them.
In fact, Sister Pan had revealed that all marjal enchantment was simply the power of the Path and the control of thread-work, but collected together into useful tools in the same way that iron and wood may be turned into many different implements, and many of those are of more immediate use than a log and a bar of iron and the option to shape both.
‘Nona?’
Nona realized that Markus had said something she missed. She looked back.
‘You asked me here …’
‘I did.’ She stepped closer and he pressed his shoulders to the wall, every thread he had bent towards her, like the reflex of a river-anemone to touch. ‘I need your help.’
Markus frowned. ‘I can help you?’
‘I need to do something dangerous and illegal.’
Markus’s frown deepened. ‘Why would you trust me? Because we rode together for a few weeks in a cage when I was ten and you were eight? I nearly got you killed two years later.’
‘I trust you because you didn’t ask me why I thought you would help, just why I would trust that help. And also because you didn’t lie about what happened at the Academy.’
‘All right.’ He met her eyes. ‘Why would I help you? It’s dangerous and against the law.’
‘You’ll help me because when they put us in that cage we never really came out of it again. And because your Abbot Jacob is still tied to the Tacsis name and so are his plans for further advancement. Doing this will help make sure that never happens. Hessa told me what happened to Four-Foot when Giljohn took you to Jacob’s house.’