“These are the verbs of the grid.”

Flight defeated Order, as Vonne had bet they would. It had apparently been a beautiful battle with a lot of jockeying for position and fluid movement, a battle in which ultimately the ability of Flight to combine reversion of damage with a split between in-your-face pressure and a threatening backline proved its virtue.

I smiled and nodded and didn’t watch any of it, and then we were moving, because our preliminary pre-fight battle of wits was coming up fast and also I was being avoidant.

“Solve.” Easy is, well, she’s not human, but she’s close enough to be setting off proximity alarms. Blue-tinted skin, sharply pointed ears, eyes that have a sort of blue tint to them instead of whites, but clearly close to human, whatever she might be. In the human ilk? As soon as she speaks, the attendant—a pleasant and unobtrusive human who doesn’t really stick in my memory—goes quiet. “Surprised to be seeing me?”

“A little bit? Raoul and Varad are going to match up with Zidanya and Amber in some capacity, obviously, so I knew that it’d be you or Peacebringer, but I thought they’d match you with Sara. Struggle.” Most of my attention is on the grid. There’s twenty five words, not twenty four, which is a variant I hadn’t studied as much.

“Confound, Deconstruct through isolation.” She shifts her body a bit on the chair, leaning an elbow on the table. “There’s an argument for it, I’ll grant, but after you made the Lady sweat, nobody’s going to call you a support.”

I could technically push the point on the linkage to Deconstruct, since the attendant hadn’t specified which set of linkage-rules we’re operating with. But if isolation is on the table, that lets me… “Move, and then under the same rule, Oppose.” I eye the muscles of her arm appreciatively. “Not exactly going to win an arm wrestling contest with you.”

“Analyze. Arms isn’t how I’d want to wrestle with you, anyway.”

“Staredown.” It isn’t, not really; sure, it’s one word in Cadoran script, but a real translation of it is something like intimidation through the eyes. “Not in the cards, I’m afraid.”

“Something wrong with what you see?” She pauses for a moment, then taps a grid square, as if as an afterthought. “Grow.”

“A lot of people seem to think very little of my self-control. Which, okay, not entirely wrong, and you are both beautiful and dressed to bypass all of my defenses.” I smile at her, and tap a word on the grid, keeping eye contact. She really is stunning; lush curves barely held in by tight, revealing leather that leave most of her thighs and breasts bare, set off by calf-length boots and fingerless gloves that nearly reach her elbow. It all shows off a musculature that only Amber outstrips. “Dance.”

Her eyes narrow slightly. “Reason. You have more self-awareness than I thought you would.”

I’m annoyed at that, a little bit, but mostly I’m annoyed that she hadn’t gotten my clever semi-joke. What good was matching taking Dance out of the options with talking about the vulnerabilities that Zidanya had used while dancing with me, if she wasn’t going to acknowledge it? “I haven’t been twenty for a few decades now, and I’ve had a lot of experience with making decisions while horny. The easiest solution is always to remove the horniness ahead of time.” It’s even true, and a strategy I’d taken to using over a decade ago, even if it wasn’t a strategy I deliberately used here. “Harmonize,” I finally say. For the same reason I take Dance away; there’s something deeply intimate about making music with someone, and that’s not a vulnerability I should be indulging in with an opponent, not without good reason.

Her eyes drop from mine, and I realize belatedly we’d been in a staring contest that I guess I’ve just won. She lingers with gaze and fingers near Build, but doesn’t move to touch it. “I’d never spike the competition. Even leaving aside the Lady’s gaze, it’s not just about winning; it’s about being the best, out of all of these teams. Race.”

“Jam.” The word has a bunch of complex connotations, many similar to Harmonize, and I remove it on that basis. I don’t see any reason why she’d take Race out of the grid, unless I’m missing some connotations about the word in its verb form; she certainly has the legs to leave me gasping. Not the appropriate way to phrase it, no need to follow that particular line of thought, I chastise myself, smirking a little.

“Something funny?”

“Just a stray thought about wordplay and unfortunate implications.”

“Mmm.” She taps on the table between us, avoiding touching the grid. “Encode,” she eventually says. “We don’t need to be enemies, Adam. I’ve spent enough time walking alone to know that no number of shadows is company enough.”

“Follow.” My eyes flicker down to the board, then back up to her face. “And yet, we’ll be trying to kill each other in due earnest soon.”

“Transpose. Surely that, of all things, is not what would stay you; there is no malice in competition, as there would be were I to insult you by a failure to strive.” Her face twists with some sort of complicated emotion. “You came well-guarded, a vessel already poured, and expected Shola. Peacebringer,” she clarifies, seeing the flash confusion on my face. “Are they more to your liking, that you felt the need to prepare?”

“Are you suggesting,” I say with a slow incredulity, “that part of my preparation for this exchange was having sex so that I specifically couldn’t be seduced by someone whom I can only describe as a nightmare, a terror elemental shoved into an amalgam of horse and human?” The grid is shuffling, words sliding around to form the second grid by some set of rules I can’t remember the workings of.

“Or a hedge against a Ranger’s beauty.”

“I don’t know how to say this delicately, but some things just don’t have anything to do with you.”

That gets a laugh out of her, one that might be a surprised laugh, unless that’s just artifice. “A point. Your Reca is worth the laundry.”

“Worth the—” I splutter, laughing. That’s a point to Easy, if we’re counting coup here. “Yeah,” I say with a smirk. “She’d be worth the laundry even if I had to do the washing. I think I have the first move in the second round?”

Easy nods gesturing at the table as she leans back in her chair, hands coming up behind her head with her fingers laced. With one leg propped over the other thigh, it’s a pose that shows off a considerable amount of muscle from her thighs to her biceps, or some other muscle in her arms, and even as bottomed-out as I am, I take note of it, and then I wrench my attention towards the board.

“Column three,” I say after a moment. It’s a shame to see Seek go, but it takes Bluff and Undermine with it, and I couldn’t take away Bluff in the sixth position without both wasting a removal on the empty fifth and removing Shift in the fourth.

“Row one.” Her response is immediate; my move was probably obvious enough that she’d already planned her move out, and she takes Build and Reflect out.

Challenge. Shift. Rhyme.

“I propose a game of insult.” Easy is definitely smirking, which suggests that this is an expected outcome, one that she’s prepared for. “Dirty forge’s rules, no specific theme.”

I have no idea what that means, but that’s fine; we open with each of us making a proposal, after all. “Runesmith’s duel,” I say after a moment. It’s not exactly common, but it’s not unheard of; you have a certain amount of time to build a runic diagram that ingests your opponent’s and spits out something, usually either something very specific or just a lethal-level attack.

“Doesn’t fulfill the rhyming criterion.”

“Rhyme is a symmetry of phoneme, there’s a functionally equivalent symmetry of elemental attunement.” I wave off her objection. “Besides, the output can be words, that would be fun. How does dirty forge’s rules fulfill Shift?”

“Forge’s rules mean you take the dross and reforge it into your tool. Dirty simply means that we are free to be… unkind to each other in the process of the insult.”

There’s a sound, half like a clearing of a throat and half like a laugh, from the right-most of the three arbitrators or mediators that is our panel. “Magelord James, Ranger Easy, does either of you have a further serious objection on the grounds of not fulfilling the criteria or non-lethality?”

“No.” We respond in more or less unison, and then, looking at each other, shrug likewise.

There’s a blurred moment. I’m caught off guard by it, don’t have the Visor up, so I don’t know what kind of magic is at play and I don’t have it recorded, but by the looks of it Easy was expecting it, because she doesn’t look discomfited at all. She sits forwards instead, turning to look at the judges, and there’s a visible tension in her muscles.

“We propose,” says the judge in the middle, “a wizard’s duel in rhyme.”

I frown at that. “Propose?”

“We will entertain objections or requests.”

“Classically, a wizard’s duel is a shapeshifting battle,” I say slowly. “What’s the adaptation to make it be in rhyme? Are we rhyming the thing we shapeshift into?”

“I would strongly object to such.” Easy’s voice is tight. Polite, but very tense. “The Magelord, with Omniglot, has an advantage that rises not from skill or experience, but from the System. This is a departure from both his and my proposals.”

“Spell-songs?” Four pairs of eyes turn to me, and I shrug off the pressure with the practice of thousands of committee meetings. “Instead of making a savage couplet that calls my mother a Firstborn collaborator,” I explain, getting a visible wince out of one of the judges, “it’d be a couplet that defines a spell in lyric and verse. Since it’s not just a matter of creatures that inherently counter each other, but of interpretation and clever layers of meaning, we’re back to, if not even ground, then ground that’s rightfully uneven.”

“Seconded.” Easy’s voice cuts across the murmuring of the judges, and I quirk an eyebrow at her. She just grins back at me, a grin full of teeth as she shifts her weight from side to side. “Seconded. You would have done better to try to keep it to runes, Magelord.”

I grin back at her. “Dance until your soul’s alight / sing until your heart takes flight. Show me yours, Ranger, and I’ll show you mine, and we’ll make something beautiful out of this ugliness.”