LITMIR.BIZ

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Instead, once again, she was aiming for a divot in a stone on the wall, playing without fear, listening for the sound of the ball striking her strings.

      Then the crowds under the tent disappeared, and she played as she always had: For the simple pleasure of playing. For the pleasure of counting her footsteps. For the love of the wind in her hair. For the joy of the plonk the ball made when it bounced on the soft earth.

      By the early afternoon, Legacy had managed to make her way from court fifty all the way to the top five courts. She had a little trouble with a long-legged boy on the third court, whose limbs seemed to stretch from the baseline to the net, and on the second court she played a freckled girl, whose serve was so powerful that Legacy whiffed the first one completely. But she managed to beat them both nevertheless, and when the horn blew, signaling five minutes to two, she realized—to her amazement—that she had only one more player to beat.

      She looked over the net. Her opponent had narrow eyes and wide shoulders. Her skin was dark as the burnt trees in the Forest of Cora, but her cropped hair was dyed silver. Waiting for Legacy’s serve, she crouched low, narrowed her eyes even further, and shifted from one foot to the other.

      Legacy paused. Suddenly the taste of metal filled her mouth, as if she’d bitten her cheek and drawn blood.

      This was it: her one chance to go to the academy. The other courts had emptied out, and the remaining players had gathered around her court to watch. So had the tournament officials and the crowds of sightseers who had apparently come out from the city. Their hair was braided in ornate patterns, and they wore lavish silks. They moved through the tent trailed by what must have been servants.

      On a platform above the court, two announcers had taken their seats: it was Paula and Angelo, the same announcers Legacy had read about in the Nova Times. They announced all the major tournaments and were almost as famous as the players themselves. Paula was as elegant as Angelo was disheveled. She wore silks in bright colors that complemented her burnished bronze skin, and her braids were gathered into a complicated three-cornered knot on top of her head. Angelo, on the other hand, looked perpetually rumpled. There was the shadow of a beard on his leathery face, and his graying hair was as mussed as if he’d only just rolled out of bed, grabbing his infamous flask on the way.

      Above the announcers’ platform perched a glass box where a group of people wearing even more elaborate silks—with extra drapes of fabric over their shoulders or jeweled belts on their tunics or narrow, shimmering pleats in their trousers—were sitting and watching. With a shock, Legacy realized they were senators. Then she saw the woman sitting at their center: High Consul Silla herself.

      Legacy stared, gripping the tennis ball she’d been tossed. Silla! The woman who, single-handedly, had managed to get the old senators under control. She had once been the greatest tennis champion in the republic. They’d called her the Queen. And after her fame helped earn her a spot on the senate, she had put out the Great Fire by using her grana to summon a storm so powerful that it doused the whole forest for weeks, causing mudslides that slicked down into the prosite mines, but finally ending the fire that had devastated the country for months.

      Sitting in the glass box, Silla looked younger than Legacy had imagined. She was wearing rust-red silk trousers and a matching silk tunic. Her jet-black hair was braided in hundreds of very thin braids, each decorated with gold beads, just as it always was in the pictures. Her skin was golden brown, but her eyes were dark and made even darker by the lines of black paint on her eyelids. They seemed to be staring straight back at Legacy, so that—for a moment—Legacy blushed.

      Overhead, a voice blared through a loudspeaker. Paula was announcing Legacy’s name. “Here,” Paula was saying, “we have Legacy Petrin, representing Foressa, the forestry province.” For a moment, Paula paused to make a face, as though she’d smelled something disgusting. The crowd broke out into hoots of laughter, and Legacy felt her cheeks growing hot with embarrassment.

      “She’s playing,” Paula continued, “against Jenni Bruno, representing Minori, the mining province.” Then she made another face, and more laughter broke out from the crowds, and Legacy had to force herself to focus on her opponent.

      Her shoulders were so wide, it seemed as if she’d have problems moving through doorways. Her face was bony and sharp, and her narrow, dark eyes sat close together.

      With her silver hair, she looked less like a girl than a dragon. She also looked older than any of the other kids Legacy had played. Legacy wondered whether there was any way Jenni was young enough to have properly qualified for the tournament, until she noticed shimmery gray prosite dust under her nails.

      So she worked in the mines, Legacy thought. And her hair wasn’t dyed. It was silver because of the prosite.

      No wonder her shoulders were so muscular. No wonder her face looked weary and lined.

      She’d come out of the mines to play in the trials. And if she lost, she’d go back to the mines. She’d go back to those shacks and the slicks of silver mud dripping down into the darkness of those craters Legacy had passed on the way. She’d go back to the rare chance to ever come up to see sunlight.

      For a moment, waiting for the horn to sound, Legacy pitied her. Then the horn blew. Legacy served, and Jenni launched her first return. It was a blistering shot, faster and more brutal than any other return Legacy had faced in the trials. Legacy realized she was facing a formidable opponent.

      Still, her pity for the girl had made her legs wooden. Her racket felt as heavy as metium ore. It was as if the air had gotten thicker. Taking a backswing was like hauling her racket through honey.

      By the time she looked up at the scoreboard, she’d lost the first game. There were only two minutes left on the clock. And even so, Legacy wasn’t sure she really cared. How, she wondered, could she justify stealing this girl’s one and only chance to escape?

      At least Legacy had a good place to go home to. She had a few more years, probably, before she had to go to work. Wouldn’t the unselfish thing to do be to throw the match and let Jenni take the scholarship?

      Distracted, Legacy glanced out at the crowd. The city dwellers were wearing silks woven with fine metal threads, shimmering gray and gold when they moved in the sunlight. Their jewels, and the complex braids they wore in their hair, made them look somehow hardened: as though they were statues come to life.

      Why, Legacy thought, should she and Jenni Bruno—two kids from the provinces—be competing against one another to please all these living statues? Why should they beat each other into the ground to entertain these city dwellers, with their servants and the precious metal threads in their silks?

      Legacy looked out at the crowd. They were pointing and clapping. They seemed perfectly delighted by the fine sunny day and the excellent match they were watching. But how, Legacy thought, could they be so cheerful? Did they not understand that if this girl with silver hair lost, she’d go back to a life underground?

      And did they not understand that if Legacy lost, Van would lose the life that he’d dreamed of, and the littles wouldn’t have enough milk in their bottles?

      Legacy felt her former embarrassment turning to anger. The heat in her cheeks had migrated to her stomach and seemed to be spreading through her body from there. On the grip of her racket, Legacy’s right hand began to feel hot. It was almost hard to hold on. She shifted her racket to her left hand. Then she blew on her right fingertips. She needed to get her anger under control.

      But the better Legacy played, the more the crowd seemed to be enjoying themselves, and the hotter Legacy’s anger burned. At the same time, her racket had grown a little lighter. The air had gotten thinner. Now, instead of hanging back on the baseline, she was moving forward, taking the ball at the top of its bounce, volleying whenever she could.

      Somehow she won that next game, breaking Jenni’s powerful serve. Even with her fingertips burning, she won the next one as well. And when the horn went off, Legacy looked up at the scoreboard and realized she’d won the match.

      The crowd was roaring. The loudspeaker

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