Thunder himself fitted me with arm guards. There was something not intrusive but intimate in the way he handled my body. He did not loom or leer, but I felt the spark all the same. Loving Vai had opened my eyes to the currents that roil the waters between people who feel attraction one for the other. But while I might have been appreciative, I was not tempted. I smiled to show I understood his game, and I stepped back politely.

He looked me up and down suggestively. “Do you play with the sword attached? Like a man? It will only get in your way.”

“I will not give the sword into anyone’s hand except my brother’s.” Although I looked around the central area, I could not see Rory. “If you bring him to me and let him watch, then I will let him hold it for me.”

“You do not ask what will happen if you do not score a point.”

“I see no need to ask,” I said.

He laughed. A second laugh echoed him in a mist of rain. At the other end of the ballcourt rose another platform. There another man sat cross-legged. He had skin the color of waves and hair like long brown seaweed: It was Thunder’s brother, Flood, he who had almost drowned me when I had been trapped beneath an overturned boat.

Vai had saved me from the flood.

Resolve steeled my heart. I would not let them intimidate me. “There’s no reason for me to play if I don’t know my brother is safe.”

“I agree,” said Thunder with a suspiciously amused smile. I scarcely had time to blink before a bedraggled saber-toothed cat appeared under the ceiba tree’s lofty roots. With amber eyes fixed on me, he limped the long painful way to the platform. When he arrived, I examined his shoulder. Like my injuries, the wounds were healing unnaturally fast. I pressed a cheek into the coarse black fur of his head, stroking behind his ears.

“I give my sword into your care until I come back for it. Wait for my signal. We may have to retreat quickly.”

I lashed the sword to his body, took a swig of the potent ginger beer, and rubbed my nose against his dry one. At last, I descended onto the ballcourt.