“I want you to put this cheeky lad on the ground, Jackov,” Thomas growled in a low voice heard by all on the field. “Don’t maim or kill him, but I want you to hurt him.”

Jackov needed no encouragement. He was moving forward already.

So then, perhaps Johnis’s plan wasn’t quite so smart after all. Why had Thomas Hunter turned against him? The Horde had killed his mother, the Forest Guard had dismissed him from service, and now the supreme commander himself, leader of all the forests, had ordered the strongest young fighter to beat him to a pulp.

Why?

Johnis set the question aside and breathed deeply. They were twenty yards from a head-on collision when he suddenly pulled up and slid to a stop.

Johnis reached under his shirt, grabbed one end of the Horde hair, and yanked it free. It hung from his hand like a knotted whip.

Those in the crowd who didn’t know he had the football gasped. Jackov blinked. He missed a step. They were no more than ten feet apart.

“My mother paid for this Horde hair with her life,” Johnis screamed. “Now it’s yours!”

He flung the cords of hair high in the air, toward Jackov. The larger boy shifted his attention from Johnis to the ball.

Johnis launched himself up and into Jackov then. His years of running had made him fast, and he was light. His body left the ground like a battering ram, fists forward.

But he didn’t strike the other fighter with his fists. One measly blow with his knuckles would do nothing but daze Jackov. Instead, he jerked his arms wide at the last moment, pulling apart Jackov’s hands to make way for his flying body.

Johnis felt the top of his head thud squarely against Jackov’s unprotected face.

Pain flashed down his spine, then was gone. Johnis landed hard, rolled to his feet, and spun back. The Horde hair was still airborne, sailing straight toward him.

Jackov, on the other hand, was on both knees, shaking the cobwebs out of his head.

Johnis snatched the Horde hair from the air and stood in a crouch, feeling confident and ready for a counter. But he decided quickly that another attack wouldn’t go nearly so smoothly for him, so he made a show of bravado by spinning to face Thomas.

“Is that what you had in mind?” he demanded.

The supreme commander had lost his smile. He stared hard, and Johnis wasn’t sure what to make of that. Hadn’t he done well?

Without waiting for Jackov to fully recover, Johnis turned his back on the group of stunned fighters, jogged to the end zone, dropped the Horde hair football unceremoniously on the ground, and faced the stadium.

For a moment the silence was so thick Johnis wondered if he was in a dream. Jackov was standing beside the other fighters, looking at him.