They did not speak before it started. There had been a moment at the bracket, hours earlier, when both of them had seen the pairing at the same time, and had looked at each other, and had said nothing at all. Elsie had gone back to stretching. Yseult had gone to find water. That had been the whole of the conversation.
PROC: Begin.
Yseult opened with earth. It was a competent opening and an entirely unimaginative one, a low ridge rising across the marked ground's midpoint to control the approach, and Elsie, reading it in the first half second, felt something in her chest go tight and unpleasant. She was being handled. Yseult had spent an entire year demonstrating that she opened with whatever was most interesting, and she had opened here with a wall.
ELS: Don't.
YSE: Don't what?
ELS: You know what.
She compressed. The wind gathered at her soles in a tight band and she was moving before the ridge finished rising, cutting the left flank at an angle Yseult had not accounted for, and she came over the low end of the wall rather than around it and closed eleven feet in the time it should have taken her to cross four. Yseult raised a second construct on pure reflex. Elsie put a pellet through it. The compression left her hand at the exact moment her foot planted, a dense knot of air no larger than a thumbnail, and it did not shatter the construct so much as perforate it, punching a clean hole through hardened air that should have turned any conventional strike, and the whole structure came apart around the wound like wet paper. The arena made a noise.
YSE: Alright.
Elsie was already inside the wreckage. She closed the last four feet and struck at the shoulder, and Yseult, giving ground for the first time, brought fire up between them in a flat sheet that Elsie had to break off and roll away from, and the heat of it caught the side of her arm as she went. Twelve seconds. She released the compression and felt the hollow immediately, the particular scraped-out sensation of a hold ending.
BRR: She got through.
MRA: She got through in nine seconds.
BRR: I've watched Yseult fight four times this tournament and nobody has been inside that guard.
Yseult stopped handling her. The change was not dramatic. She simply stopped raising walls, and the ground under Elsie's feet turned to something loose and shifting that ate her footing, and when Elsie compressed to break free of it the air around her went hot enough that the compression itself became a liability, a dense knot of superheated wind pressed against her own skin. She released it, and dispersed, and the heat went with it, and she landed badly.
YSE: You're not going to like the next part.
ELS: I didn't like that part.
Yseult brought all three at once. Earth first, a spearing column that Elsie broke off from; wind in her wake to close the escape line; fire arriving at the intercept where the wind pushed her, and it was, Elsie recognized somewhere in the middle of surviving it, genuinely elegant work. Not the flashy multi-discipline display of the festival. Something considerably more efficient. Each element doing the minimum necessary and handing off cleanly to the next. She got out of it by compressing at the wrong moment. It was not a decision. Her hands did it before she had decided anything, wind knotting at her right sole alone and firing her sideways rather than forward, an angle that left her half-falling and entirely out of the intercept, and the fire arrived where she had been going instead of where she was. She hit the ground on her shoulder and came up with her arm numb. Eight seconds. Wasted on a survival she had not planned. She reset.
Yseult let her, which was its own kind of statement, and the two of them circled the marked ground with the crowd noise rising around them and something entirely wordless passing between them.
This is genuinely dangerous, Elsie thought.
She meant it as an observation. It arrived as a relief. Yseult was thinking about Arthur. It surfaced without being invited, somewhere in the middle of a circling step, an image of his face in the dark and a hand pressed against his cheek and a promise she had not asked for and had needed more than she could account for, and it arrived accompanied by the specific and unhelpful awareness that the girl across from her did not know any of it had happened. She set it down.
It was not relevant. It had nothing to do with the marked ground or with the fourteen seconds she had spent all year watching Elsie Tanner fail to exceed, and she had, she reminded herself, entered this tournament to find out what her own work was worth against somebody genuinely trying to stop her. Elsie was trying to stop her. That was the whole of what mattered.
Elsie went again. She had spent three exchanges learning the shape of Yseult's transitions, the small predictable seam where one discipline handed off to the next, and she went for it directly, compressing hard and cutting inside on a line that should have put her at Yseult's flank in the half beat between earth and fire. Yseult did not transition.
She held the earth and layered the fire over it, both at once, which cost her visibly and which Elsie had not seen anyone do all tournament, and the flank Elsie had been counting on simply did not open.
She adjusted mid-stride. She had fourteen seconds and had used six of them and she committed the remaining eight to a single decision, driving forward through the heat rather than around it because around it no longer existed, and she put two pellets into the earth construct at point-blank range and blew a gap through it wide enough to pass. Her sleeve caught fire. She went through anyway.
She came out the other side inside Yseult's guard with her arm burning and eight seconds gone and struck once, hard, into the ribs, and Yseult folded around it and went down onto one knee. The arena was extremely loud.
Elsie stood over her with her sleeve smoking and her whole right side numb and fourteen seconds entirely spent, and understood, with total clarity, that she had just used everything she had. Yseult looked up at her.
YSE: That was very good.
ELS: I know.
YSE: I mean it. That was genuinely the best thing anyone has done to me all year.
She got up. She should not have been able to get up that quickly. Elsie registered it as an anomaly a half second before she saw Yseult's hands come together against her own sternum, palms flat, the particular contact that Elsie had watched her use exactly once before, months ago, on Briar in a workshop. The color came back into her face. Her breathing steadied. The way she carried her weight changed. Whatever the strike into her ribs had taken out of her simply stopped being gone.
YSE: Sorry.
ELS: For what?
YSE: For this part.