The entire Arena understood what the gesture had meant.

Yan Wuji had pointed his blade across three concentric rings to Lin Xuan’s cushion in front of fifteen thousand witnesses, and the fifteen thousand had not finished processing it before he had walked off. The other semifinal had not been fought. The other semifinal would happen tomorrow at sunrise. And Yan Wuji had already named who he wanted in the final.

Lin Xuan kept his face flat for the rings and let his attention drift across them. It found Su Qingyue in the Frostmoon tribune.

Her face was the face of a woman raised to keep public composure. To a stranger, she was watching the polished stone with the same level temperature she had worn through the round of the principal bracket.

To Lin Xuan, the seam of her mouth had moved.

A fraction along the left. A breath of tension that had not been there before Yan Wuji had raised the blade. The eyebrow she controlled most of her register with was half a degree lower than its rest position. To a man who had spent the week studying her on the floor, the difference might as well have been her sitting up on the cushion and saying the words out loud.

She had taken the gesture personally.

[ Careful with this one, Xuan. He just made her a public second-choice in front of every cushion in the city. She is going to want to put a coin on the table tomorrow that costs the Pavilion something to acknowledge. You are about to face a more motivated Su Qingyue than the one in your head this morning. ]

’That’s good.’

[ ...Good? ]

’I do not want her on half rations. If I beat a focused Su Qingyue with margin, I have a real measurement for the final. If I beat someone who’s half distracted, the reading wouldn’t be good, and I’d be entering Yan Wuji blind.’

He walked home in the slow current of citizens leaving the Arena, ate the meal Lian had covered for him on the low table, meditated until the cup at his ribs ran full, and slept with Plain Steel propped within arm’s reach.

The dawn climbed the eastern shutter at the angle a dawn climbed when it had business it intended to finish.

The polished stone was waiting when they climbed it.

Lin Xuan came up the southern stair. Su Qingyue came up the eastern. They met at the center with the formal distance protocol asked of them, and Lin Xuan decided the line was worth saying.

"It did not affect you, did it? What he did yesterday."

The corner of her mouth was already doing the thing it did when she was about to deflect.

"Were you worried about me, Young Master Lin Xuan? I appreciate the concern. But I will not say it was anything other than additional motivation. People will underrate me for being a woman. They have done it since the bracket opened. If I am the one standing in the final, the expectation gets corrected. I imagine I will exceed it."

"Mistress Su Qingyue. Forgive me. I am also not in a position to lose."

The referee elder climbed onto the platform. "The contestants will hold further conversation. We will begin shortly."

The shortly took longer than the protocol called for.

Lin Xuan let his attention drift across the rings and found the gap. The lower-northwest sector was short one of the two figures that had been there every day of the tournament.

’Mira. Someone has not arrived?’

[ The two old men. Only one is here. He came up the back stair half a count ago. He is bleeding through the inside of his robe along the left side. He should not be standing. ]

’There was noise in the city last night. The guards moved twice on the lane behind the residence. I thought it was a brawl.’

[ Definitely not a brawl. We can dig into what happened later, but the part that matters right now is that he dragged himself here in that state. He’s not on that cushion to watch the combat. ]

The wounded elder reached his cushion. The referee elder, who had been waiting for him, raised his hand the moment the taller man lowered himself onto the silk.

Su Qingyue had caught Lin Xuan’s drift across the rings.

"You should focus on me. If you intend to walk off this floor on your own feet."

He brought his attention back to her without hurrying. The line was already in his throat, and nothing else in the rings needed it more than she did.

"Mistress Su, with respect, the drifting around was a small courtesy I owed the rest of the audience. You’re frankly the only person in the Arena worth a look, and at some point it was going to be unfair on the rest of them."

The composure she had been holding for the rings did not entirely hold.

The seam of her mouth gave a quarter degree. The eyebrow she controlled most of her register with rose half a finger. A breath she had not budgeted for went in through her nose. She caught it and put it back, but the catching was visible to him.

"Begin."

The referee elder’s hand fell.

Lin Xuan moved on the first heartbeat.

Cloud Step pulled him off the ground and set him at three paces from her chest in less time than her recovery would have asked for. Plain Steel rose into the high guard he had practiced for fifteen days under Yun Hai. The opening cut began its descent.

Su Qingyue did not retreat.

She stepped forward into him.

The first sole of her boot touched down with the long blue blade of Frostmoon angled point-down beside her, and the Qi that uncurled from the steel was not the Qi of a sword. It was the Qi of a season. A thin sheet of cold spilled out from the patch under her foot, fanning in concentric rings two paces in every direction. The dust at the edge of the rings froze into a fine lattice of crystals that drew themselves in a flower of six points around her feet.

The temperature inside the radius dropped three degrees in one breath.

Lin Xuan’s Qi, riding down the spine of Plain Steel into the cut, slowed by a grade as it crossed her perimeter. The cut he had committed to lost a fraction of speed it could not afford to lose.

In the first row of the lower ring, a citizen’s breath fogged for the first time against the morning air.

Su Qingyue raised the blade.

The frost flower under her feet held.