When they reached the end of the bench, Ryber led the way up a rickety set of stairs to the exclusive seating area. There the Masters of the Ring kept private boxes. Thus far, none of the Masters had been willing to sponsor Stix. She’d used every trick in her Waterwichery arsenal trying to convince them, from creating fog on the spot to freezing water in their mouths. But all they’d done was glower and say, Too powerful. How’re we supposed to design a fight for you when all it takes is a single snap and you’ve frozen everything?

Stix had been forced to admit they had a point. There wasn’t much sport for someone with total control over water—and the truth was that Stix was unbeatable. She had never encountered a waterfall she couldn’t scale, a wave she couldn’t ride, an opponent she couldn’t decimate.

Her father had always told her such natural power made her overconfident, that one day, You will meet someone you cannot match. And in the end, he’d been right: the voices had snuck up on Stix, unexpected. Unfathomable.

Now here she was, over a month since they’d arrived, still battling against them. Still losing every day.

The raiders that guarded the highest scaffolding let Stix through at the flicker of a gold coin, and she and Ryber strode quickly down the covered walkway. Banners and curtains trailed at the corner of Stix’s vision; the crowd’s roars thrummed in her ears, blessedly muffled this high.

The smell was muffled too, thank Noden, with salty ocean wind to lick over the wooden planks.

Soon Stix and Ryber reached the final private box on the walkway, where the final Master of the Ring awaited. The only one Stix had yet to meet. She doled out four gold coins each to the two guards here. Two for letting her in and two for alerting her that the final Master had returned to town. Then the tallest guard called in an alto voice, “Visitors,” and prodded Stix and Ryber through the doorway.

Though not as resplendent as some of the other decks Stix had visited, the space was still draped in fine rugs and cushions. Wind kicked over the waist-high railings, flapping at two strips of jagged-edged red cloth. It carried bidding and laughter and roars of anticipation for the next fight—and it carried moisture that sang to Stix’s magic. A harmony of humidity, of distant sea spray off the bay, of brackish droplets from the marsh.

On a long chair lay Admiral Kahina Léon.