The cold, snow-white winter sun had hardly drifted an hour in the sky before Feldwebel Shaw excused himself from his designated bench. Something about the gilded chairs, the velvet bunting, and the grand brocaded curtains decorating the elevated box seats (set aside for senior guild representatives at the tournament) had always reminded him more of a dusty theatre event than something appropriate for a battle showcase. Particularly since the violent end to his field career, they’d represented a special, private sort of public discomfort, as though he was playing both witness and ceremonial player in his own banal mummification.
Heron stepped gingerly down the long string of rough plywood stairs, but after he’d joined the thick crowd milling in front of the bleachers, the newly-calcified layer of stiffness over his joints started to disintegrate and disperse. His large, leonine head lifted from the boards, and he peered over various pates to a patch of grass along the edge of the arena where the spectators weren’t quite so plentiful. The familiar figure leaning against the split-rail fence on the median, blue-black hair tucked into her coat, didn’t register until he was all but ten yards off. It was an odd struggle not to falter to a stop in the stream of people.
Funny, how far just a few degrees on a new vector can take you: a handful of leisurely seconds later, his fist curled around the first horizontal rung of the fence, an inch or two from Ofelia’s right shoulder, his gaze directed at the field before them, uneven with churned mud and ice. A row of banners cracked like cap guns in the breeze far above their heads.
“Not sure why I didn’t expect you here.”
The voice (still not familiar, not etched in her bones, not yet) might ordinarily have made her jerk in surprise, but Ofelia had long since learned to master her reactions—thousands of gil often rode on the flutter of an eyelash, the twitch at the corner of a mouth, the intake of a breath.
So she didn’t react at all, simply taking a long slow moment before turning her head and acknowledging Heron’s arrival with a nod. As if they’d agreed to meet here, as if this had been long-planned and a rendezvous in the making.
“Public bloodletting and uproarious crowds didn’t seem my scene, perhaps?” Ofelia smiled her sphinxlike smile at the fighter, her hands tucked away into deep pockets. A brisk breeze rifled through Heron’s hair like wind through a cornfield. His beard, shaved off for the grand fete, was quickly returning, gold shot through with silver.
“Suppose I wouldn’t know,” he said, his smile nearly as difficult to read as hers.
“I never participate in these sorts of things, but I always watch. Quite useful intel, if you look at it in the right way.”
“Intel?” Heron cocked an eyebrow, gentle skepticism leaking through. Decades had passed since he’d ceased being able to watch a fight superficially. Combat, to him, was an endlessly complex (and yet endlessly reducible) compendium of human movement, of precision, of passion--even of symbolism. Civilians with insinuated expertise always pinged both his interest and his apprehension, much in the way a literary scholar might react when their favorite book is brought up over a casual dinner.
“Enlighten me.”
Ofelia heard that skepticism, caught it, and chose not to volley it back. The woman knew her abilities; she could look at humes like a bookie might look at a favoured racing chocobo, a collection of strengths and weaknesses and statistics. (Know thy enemy, her mother had whispered to her, long ago.)
“If I’m ever to end up on the wrong side of any of these people,” she said mildly, “it helps to already know how they behave in battle. Which styles they favour, where their weak points might be. It might not be possible to literally rank every single fighter, mage, and bard in this city, but tournaments do come close. And additionally, if I’m to make any money off these competitions, I do need to know the contestants, don’t I?”