“What if it rains?”

“What if I want to eat something?”

“I told them to serve dinner in your receiving room. So you’ll have to do your receiving somewhere else. Maybe you can do that outside.”

A man was on his hands and knees on the floor ruling out the piste with a lump of chalk.

“Quentin,” Eliot said, “I just heard from someone in the shipwrights’ guild. Do you have any idea what that ship of yours is costing us? The Jackalope or whatever it is?”

“No. The Muntjac.”

“About twenty years’ worth of Outer Island taxes, that’s how much it’s costing us,” Eliot said, answering his own question. “Just in case you were curious how much it’s costing us.”

“I wasn’t that curious.”

“But you do see the irony.”

Quentin considered this.

“I do. But it’s not about the money.”

“What’s it about then?”

“It’s about observing good form,” Quentin said. “You of all people know all about that.”

Eliot sighed.

“I suppose I can see that,” he said.

“And I need this. That’s all I can tell you.”

Eliot nodded. “I can see that too.”

Contestants began trickling into the city a few days later. They were a bizarre menagerie: men and women, tall and short, haunted and feral, scarred and branded and shaved and tattooed. There was an ambulatory skeleton and an animated suit of armor. They carried swords that glowed and buzzed and burned and sang. A handsome pair of conjoined twins offered to enter individually and, in the event that they vanquished the field, gallantly declared themselves willing to fight each other. An intelligent sword arrived, borne on a silk pillow, and explained that it wished to enter, it merely required somebody willing to wield it.

On the first day of the tournament there were so many pairings that some of the bouts had to be held outside after all, on wooden stages set up in the courtyards. A circus atmosphere prevailed. The weather was just turning—it was the first cold morning of the year—and the fighters’ breath smoked in the dawn air. They performed all kinds of weird stretches and warm-ups on the wet grass.

It was everything Quentin had hoped for. He couldn’t sit still long enough to watch a whole match, there was always something unmissable going on in the next ring over. Shouts and clashes and weird war cries and even less easily identifiable noises broke the early morning calm. It was like being in a battle, but minus all the death and suffering.

It was three full days before the contestants worked their way through the draw to the final pairing. There were a few incidents and explosions along the way, where forbidden weaponry or major magic overpowered the safeguards they’d put in place, but no one was hurt too badly, thank God. Before it started he’d had a romantic idea about entering the tournament himself in disguise, but he could see now what a disaster that would have been. He wouldn’t have lasted thirty seconds.