Jade War

Anden looked down and saw that, indeed, he had taken the wrong bicycle. It was nearly identical to his own, but the red paint was new and unscratched, the tread on the tires still pristine. The owner seized the handlebars. “You thought you could steal my new bike?” He launched into an accusatory tirade in Espenian too rapid for Anden to follow.

“Sorry.” Anden’s face burned with embarrassment as he got off the bike. “Sorry. Mistake.”

The man shoved Anden aside roughly. “You’ve got to be the dumbest thief around. You have any idea who I am? Don’t you even speak Espenian?”

Anden’s grasp of the language was far from perfect, but he understood enough to know he was being accused of thievery. At first he was astonished; then a surge of angry defensiveness flooded up his neck and into his head. Thieves were the lowest sort of people; being called a thief was worse than being called a coward or a degenerate. Men in Kekon were killed for less. Who would say such an abusive thing to a complete stranger, without giving the other person any chance to explain? “No steal,” he protested vehemently. “I said mistake.”

“Yeah, sure, nice try. Get out of here, go back to wherever you came from, you dumb fuck.” The man began to push his bike away. Anden stood dumbfounded for a second. Then he took several quick strides and grabbed the back of the bicycle seat. The man spun back around, his mouth open in outraged surprise.

“I didn’t steal your bike.” Anden enunciated each word. “Apologize.”

“Are you kidding me?” shouted the man. “You sound like a keck—is that what you are? You want your fucking face smashed?” He dropped his bike to the ground and faced Anden with fists upraised.

Anden experienced a moment of severe doubt. All he’d wanted was for the man to take back what he’d said; no one deserved to be roughly treated and slandered over such a simple error. He wasn’t keen to fight this man, but he couldn’t think of any way out that didn’t involve retreating—which was not acceptable, as he was the one who’d been so badly insulted. In Janloon, if he’d had friends with him as witnesses, he might’ve tried to reschedule the contest to a later time and place—sometimes, cooler heads prevailed in the interim—but he had no idea what the dueling customs were in Espenia, and it didn’t look as if the other man was about to back down.

Anden took off his glasses and put them in the side pocket of his school bag before setting it down on the grass next to the sidewalk. He raised his fists and fell into a poised, evenly weighted stance, still wondering why it had come to this at all. Why couldn’t the other man have simply accepted his apology for the mistake and moved on?

The man’s eyes widened in surprise, then narrowed in angry menace. “Oh, you’re asking for it now, you cocky little—” He rushed forward and swung at Anden’s head.

It had been some time—his final Trials at the Academy, to be exact—since Anden had fought, and he was initially slow to react. He barely fended off the man’s opening barrage of punches, and though he saw the obvious opportunity to counterattack, he’d overcompensated for his sluggish reflexes by retreating too far out of striking range and couldn’t move fast enough to close the distance before his opponent squared up to face him again. Anden shook his head, frustrated at himself; Hilo would’ve cuffed him hard about the head for being so sloppy. As he was thinking this, his adversary popped a perfect jab through his guard and hit Anden in the cheek.

Pain bloomed in Anden’s face. Being struck seemed to snap an entire childhood of martial training back into place; he lowered his chin and shoulders and ducked under the next blow, burying a fist in the man’s side. His opponent grunted in pain and made to fling an arm around Anden’s neck in a headlock. Anden dropped the point of his elbow into the man’s thigh and shoved himself backward, dodging under the grip and sending the Espenian stumbling ahead. The man recovered his footing immediately and came back at Anden with an onslaught of heavy blows. Most of them battered Anden’s raised arms but a few connected with his stomach and sides with eye-watering force, and one popped him in the mouth hard enough to cut his lip on his teeth. There was little finesse to the man’s fighting, but there was plenty of speed and power, and the brash instinct of someone who’d been in more than his fair share of scraps before. He was larger than Anden, and angrier, and in this blunt physical contest, those two things gave him the advantage.

It occurred to Anden, in a sudden surge of panic and shame, that he—the youngest member of the Kaul family, schooled at one of the best martial academies on Kekon—was about to be beaten by an Espenian street brawler.