As Nick observed the gauntlet on the ground and understanding dawned, his tired eyes returned to me, a wave of calm settling over him. The well-worn exhaustion in his face cleared. Ever since we’d unexpectedly reunited within the suits’ compound he’d felt unhinged, untethered, as if he was overcompensating for a piece of himself that eroded away.

He patted my shoulder gently, then pushed me away. “Nah.”

My eyebrow shot up. “‘Nah?’ What—” I looked at the knight, his shadow arm still on full display as he waited for Nick’s answer. “What in the ever-loving fuck do you mean, ’nah?’”

“The way you operate. Protecting the people you love no matter what you have to do to achieve that outcome, I respect it. I really do.” Nick shifted his head from side to side, stretched his arms, bent his leg and grabbed the ankle of his once-crippled leg, pulling it backward in a runner's stretch. “But you can’t fight all my battles for me. And I can’t be the person I want to be if I fold into the fetal position and let you dirty your hands every time it gets hard.”

“What are we even talking about right now…” I trailed off, bewildered, as I turned to look at the knight, slowly putting the pieces together. “Because of him? The only goddamn reason he stopped is because I turned his psychology against him. They’re just monsters in armor, Nick. Monsters with rules.”

“Is Audrey just a monster? Talia? Azure?” Nick raised an eyebrow. “From everything you’ve said, they seem pretty human to me.”

The flippant comment caught me off-guard. And as much as I wanted to reject that on pure technicality, Talia and Audrey had both grieved their families and bore scars from the loss, in a manner that was uncannily similar to human grief. At some point, I had stopped thinking of all my summons as highly intelligent animals and started thinking of them as people. Over the last few months, they’d both performed far above their station and saved my ass more times than I cared to count. On top of all that, they’d questioned their own existence, and wanted answers for why they were created. That was as human as it got.

Before I could rally, Nick continued. “I’m not the same fighter I was. I’ve learned a lot. Trained. Gained new abilities I’m restricted from even talking about. This guy has a legitimate grievance. He believes I’ve stolen something I wasn’t meant to have. He might be right. And even though you talked him into it, he stood down and chose fairness. It’s only right that I give him a proper shot.”

Nick was going to die. After everything I’d gone through to save him, he was going to fucking die.

“This isn’t a game. You’re not getting paragon points for this shit. Don’t be stupid.” I snapped.

Nick’s smile faded. “Yeah. Guess it’s a little much, expecting trust after the trail of fuck-ups that got me here.”

The words lined up like beaded sights.

If you’d listened to me in the tunnel, instead of losing yourself in rage and self-righteousness, we’d be in a helluva better place then we are right fucking now.

I couldn’t pull the trigger.

Nick already knew he’d made a mistake in the tunnel, he’d all but copped to it. If I let the bolt fly, it would still end him, just in a different way. Still. Letting it go was like breathing glass.

“No. I trust you. More now than ever.” I pushed him forward. “Knock ‘em dead.”

His eyes widened, the dimming light returned to his expression full force. He held out his fist, and I bumped it, numbly watching as he approached the center knight.

For whatever reason Nick had decided this was a hill he was willing to die on, and I needed to respect it. At least for now. If push came to shove and things turned dire, I wasn’t sure I could stop myself from intervening.

But that didn’t mean I had to make it easy for them.

Nick drew his sword and hefted his shield. The central knight held his sword at the ready, and the tension in the room grew viscous, the shadows almost palpable.

“What the hell are you doing?” I snapped, going for a mix of enraged, irritated, and condescending.

“Uh.” Nick said, staring at me awkwardly.

The central knight said nothing, but I felt his murderous gaze turn towards me once again.

“Him I get.” I chucked a thumb at Nick. “Lack of myth knowledge, probably a little CTE sprinkled on top—“

“Hey!” Nick protested.

“—but you?” I stood directly in front of the central knight, cutting between them. “You should know damn well how duels work.”

The murderous gaze turned downright fatal, and for a moment, I thought he might cut me down where I stood. Enough so that I got to the point, rather than waiting for him to ask. “There’s always a second, there’s always a brief period of negotiation where the seconds negotiate acceptable terms.”

“It is a duel to the death. That is non-negotiable.” The knight said flatly.

“If that’s the only territory you think we have to cover, the ripple really has addled your brains.” I shot back, listing on my fingers. “There’s acceptable weapon usage, acceptable item and magic usage, whether the combat will be broken up by recovery periods or it’s a marathon to the finish, conditions to be followed if someone’s weapon breaks—”

“A pretender does not retain the right to a second.” The central knight growled.

My LSAT prep popped into my head as I recognized the fallacy. “That’s the entire point of your duel, isn’t it? To establish his legitimacy. Denying him a second by taking the result of a duel as a foregone conclusion seems clearly unchivalrous, if not outright malfeasant, don’t you think?”

My attention derailed as one of the flanking knights muttered something, only for the central knight to hold out a hand, swiftly silencing him.

Did he just say “Fucking Merlin?”

I ignored it and moved on. “For the moment, the assumption must be that he is a knight. And as his page, I am his second by default. To deny me this role is to deny the basic tenets upheld by the round table, that you and your like sacrificed lives to defend.”

Slowly, the central knight looked at Nick, and in a voice that sounded like he’d aged a thousand years, asked. “Do you wish to designate this one as your second, ser?”

With that hurdle cleared, I gave Nick a full-toothed smile, the one that generally made people profoundly uncomfortable.

“Yep.” Nick blurted. “Second. Sounds good.”

/////

I’d made several ridiculous initial demands, giving myself as much time as possible to engineer a solution with the highest chance of getting us out of this alive that wouldn’t rain on Nick’s hero moment. First, I requested that the surrounding circle of shadows receded, as they were a source of intimidation that would affect Nick far more than it affected the local knights. That took more effort than I’d expected, as the shadows didn’t seem compliant, and it took a small army of shadow men in tabards to push them back, which provided valuable intel—though it showed this ripple was far more populated than I’d hoped. The possibility of fighting our way out in the worst-case scenario grew more and more bleak.

Next I asked for a table and two chairs as setting for the negotiation, and spent an absurd amount of time arranging them, then asked for the shadow servants to bring out racks of weapons for our champions to choose from, and spent an absurd amount of time arranging them.

They didn’t let me run ramshackle over them, drawing the line when I requested a small selection of food for the negotiations, but saving that, with their honor so blatantly called into question they more or less bent over backward to achieve fairness and be generous to the challenged, so long as I could justify it. And while he’d hovered over me at first, the central knight had eventually thrown up his hands and given up supervising me and taken a place in the corner next to Nick.

Nick, naturally, chatted him up, and the last time I checked on them they were examining each other’s weapons and seemed to be in the middle of a spirited conversation. Or argument. Either way, they were distracted, which was exactly what I wanted.

By the time my plan fully formed, every person in the room had distanced themselves from me for fear of another demand, and when I placed two sheets of paper on the table, no one was paying enough attention to notice.

I withdrew a pen from my inventory and pressed it hard against the top page, then lifted the corner to confirm.

With a deep breath, I leaned back in the seat and let myself relax. Then announced, “I’m ready.”

“Oh?” The central knight called over. “Our hospitality finally meets your standards?”

I nodded, fiddling with the pen beneath the table, trying to force myself to relax.

“Then I will call my second.”

The withdrawn shadows had revealed a stairwell at the far end of the room, their destination still shrouded in darkness. Somewhere in the black, there was a rhythmic clank as armored feet descended, revealing the long body of what was possibly the tallest man in armor I’d ever seen.

Like the rest of the knights, his helmet covered his face.

Despite his long, almost awkward frame, he slid into the chair across from me with a sinewy grace I found disquieting, and towered over me in torso height alone. The lower section of his reflective breastplate ground against the table. He reached down to move it, blatantly over-correcting and shoving the edge of the table into my gut.

“So. This is the whelp that wants to negotiate terms? Doesn’t look like much.” The sneer I couldn’t see carried in his voice.

Despite myself, I smiled.

A bully. I can work with that.