Madoc’s thoughts were muddled. He searched for Elias but still didn’t see him in the mouth of the tunnel.
Ash.
She was at the edge of the stands, watching him with wide eyes and parted lips. He clung to her gaze, desperate for something to steady himself. The rest of the crowd would see the dust and assume he’d used geoeia, but Ash knew what he’d done.
She could go to the gods, now with proof that he was different.
No. She wouldn’t do that. She’d stood by him when Stavos had died. She’d pressed herself against his side, unafraid of this strange power lurking inside him.
Would she fear him now?
It didn’t matter. He’d won. He’d saved his family, at least for one more day. But as he rose unsteadily, he felt no joy or even relief.
There was thirst. He longed for Jann’s hatred, for Ash’s pain, for Ilena’s grief. He was parched for their emotions. Now that he’d had a taste, he wanted more.
Madoc shook his head. He didn’t know what was happening. This was different from the fight against Fentus, or any opponents before him. Madoc hadn’t just sensed Jann’s weakness; he’d made him weak without even touching him. He’d willed Jann’s submission, just as he’d willed those centurions to leave Ash alone, just as he’d willed the pain to leave her body. He’d taken an invisible step, and the change rippled through him, powerful and undeniable. Siphoning the hate from Jann’s soul had made him something more—something terrible and dangerous.
A champion.
Slowly, he raised his hands over his head, and the arena screamed his name.
Fourteen
Ash
WHEN ASH WAS eight, she was obsessed with aereia.
It had been shortly after she had learned that her birth father had been from Lakhu, and so Ash was part Lak. She was certain that that meant she could learn to control air energy too, though Char told her repeatedly that mortals could only hold one type of divinity in them.
On visits to Lakhu, while Char and Ignitus’s other gladiators warred against his god-sister’s fighters, Ash studied the Air Divine. They moved deliberately, in contrast to the sharp ferocity of Fire Divine. When they used aereia, there was a ripple in the particles around them, dust disturbed by the funnels of air they pulled and directed.
Ash had taught herself to move like them. She put all her focus into imagining the air swelling and puckering—but she hadn’t wanted to be Air Divine, not really. She had started to understand the awfulness of Ignitus, the growing poverty from scarce resources in Kula, and she had just wanted something else, anything else, to link her to a different god.
So she knew what it looked like when someone used aereia. And she knew what it did not look like.
The crowd in the arena was hysterical. Madoc’s opponent scrambled for the exit, his face the ghastly gray of someone who had seen death. But Madoc hadn’t touched the man. The air hadn’t moved; all the dust, the geoeia from Jann’s attacks, hadn’t so much as twitched.
What had Madoc done to him?
“You said you thought he was Air Divine,” Tor whispered next to her.
Every muscle in Ash’s body, tense already, wound so tight that she started to see stars. Madoc having aereia had been a wild guess. “What else could it be?”
“Water, maybe?” Taro leaned around Ash to frown at her brother, one hand clasped in Spark’s, who watched from the end of the aisle. “He could’ve manipulated the water in Jann’s blood. Hurt him in ways we couldn’t see.”
The crowd’s voices had meshed into one steady cheer. “Madoc! Madoc! Madoc!”
They thought Madoc had used geoeia somehow. It wouldn’t occur to anyone else that he hadn’t used his god’s divine gift.
“But how would hydreia have affected me after Rook’s death?” Ash asked. “And Hydra’s people are peaceful.”
Tor’s arms were crossed over his chest, his face bowed in thought as Madoc lifted his hands to the audience. “Are they?”
Ash could see his mind working, connections weaving together.
Hydra had sent the message that Ash had intercepted, assuring Ignitus that his worries about an unknown threat were invalid. Had she lied? Could she have planted one of her people in Deimos to fight for Geoxus? Was that the gladiator Ignitus feared? But that meant then that Hydra was part of the stripping of Kula’s resources. That she was no longer a peaceful god.
Four gods had united against Ignitus, then? Why? And hydreia didn’t explain the way Madoc had soothed Ash’s grief after Rook’s death. The