Chapter 338: Can She Win?
"Is it me, or are the crowds even larger today?"
Ashlynn’s simple question prompted several people in the private box to crane their necks, looking out at the gathering crowds and trying to compare them to yesterday. Perhaps the crowd was larger, but in a space so vast, it was hard to say. Perhaps there were another thousand people? Two thousand? No one dared venture a guess, though one person felt it was more likely than not.
"Tomorrow is a rest day for the field workers," High Lady Erna explained as she sipped on a wine that was such a deep red that it appeared almost purple. "Since they don’t have to work tomorrow, they’re more willing to indulge today. I expect the crowds will be even larger tomorrow."
"High Lady, you sound very confident that our friend will win again today," a light, feminine voice said from the row of seats behind the thrones. "She’s fought forty men already. Do you really think she can win again today? They say that Yotsun hired some extraordinary mercenaries to fight in today’s battle."
"Too easy, too easy," Talauia said. Her wings hummed with a faint, high-pitched wine that matched her excitement and she hovered an inch or two above her chair before she realized what she was doing and forced herself to calm down. "Heila won’t lose, she’ll never lose. Not in something like this," the Thistle Witch said confidently.
"I know she’s already one four times," the serpentine woman said. "But shouldn’t she be getting tired by now? She can’t keep this up forever, can she?" If the first day’s victory could be attributed to people underestimating the diminutive young witch, then the fights from the second day on could only be considered increasingly desperate attempts to break her down and find some weakness that could be exploited.
The injuries that Heila sustained on the third day were fairly light and she was able to use her own witchcraft to recover from them easily enough. It was yesterday’s bloody battle that combined sorcerers with gladiators to besiege the young witch that seemed to have pushed Heila to the edge, requiring Ashlynn to personally tend to her wounds afterward.
"There’s too much at stake for Heila to back down now, Nereida," Ashlynn said, addressing the woman that Heila had befriended when Jacques brought her to one of the smaller arenas in High Fen City during their last visit.
It had surprised Ashlynn a bit to learn that Heila had made good enough friends in such a brief period of time that she insisted on visiting Nereida, Eusebia, and Delmatia the day after their arrival in High Fen City. It turned out that Heila wasn’t only acting out of friendship, there had been some practical purpose to her decision to engage with the women, but the more time Ashlynn spent with the trio of wealthy women from the Scaled Clan, the more she understood why Heila liked them.
Ashlynn’s first impression of Nereida at the Masquerade Ball had been mild. She struck her as not being very different from the countless wives of wealthy merchants she’d seen in her father’s court in Blackwell County. She was exceptionally well mannered, well educated, and had a refined taste that prized the finer things in life. When she’d met Jacques, the man had instantly dismissed her as a blood-sucking mosquito and tried to keep her away from Ashlynn.
The more Ashlynn came to know her over the past few days, the more she came to respect the woman. Certainly, when Heila asked for Nereida’s help to find a hatter who could craft traveling hats and a fancier hat for Ashlynn, there had been an element of currying favor in the effort the serpentine woman put into pleasing them. But that kind of social maneuvering was so expected that Ashlynn would have been more hesitant if Nereida didn’t try to take advantage in small ways than if she did.