The impact shakes my legs hard enough that I stumble. The motion sends me sprawling into Capri’s back. It’s clumsy contact. My lowered shoulder shoves him accidentally toward the edge. He screams and I reach for him in a panic, trying to keep him from falling, but his riding scarf slips through my fingers. He vanishes into the night with a scream.

Cursing, I turn to face the other. My baton barely catches his first strike, and his second, and his third. He’s good, and this time he’s on higher ground, but with each new blow I can see his forearms trembling more and more. I am too strong for him.

My switch starts to move faster as his moves slower, and he opens himself up with a wide and tired strike. I sweep the blow left with my off-hand and punch my own baton into his throat. The wood catches him hard and folds him in on himself. My second swing takes out his legs and the third has him raising his hands for mercy.

“Please,” he says. “Please don’t.”

He wants what he would never give. That’s the way of all Ashlords.

I bring the switch down on his knee, then his hip, then his nose. There’s no mercy in the strength of my arm or in the accuracy of each strike. I don’t take pleasure in giving pain, but this is a necessary message, to him and to all of his kind. I’m playing by their rules in the Races, but there will come a day when we are no longer at their mercy.

It’s possible they’ll be at ours.

I leave him unconscious in the dust. I don’t bother using wormwood. That’s their kind of poison. Calling forth demons to haunt horses. I flip the lid of my fifth cube and take a pinch of the fine, white powder there: Rend.

It’s a substance most Ashlords know, even if they pretend it’s beneath them. Some use it in training to better understand the true limits of a phoenix’s heart and body. It’s an effective poison. Get their horse up anywhere close to a trot, and the heart will burst. I’ve always liked it because it cuts away the core of what a phoenix is: blood and bone and sunlight.

Both riders will be able to walk their horses tomorrow, and little else.

I give both sets a healthy dose before remembering the Ashlord I shoved over the cliff. The second is still knocked out, but the first hasn’t climbed back up looking for a fight. And no officials have thundered out to punish me for murder, either. Silence has my guard up again.