Forty seconds into the trees, Uwana grabs the stranger's shoulder and spins him.
The punch was already swinging before the spin finished—right hand, straight to the jaw. The stranger tilts his head and the knuckles catch temple instead, and the skin splits across Uwana's middle two fingers like it was waiting for an excuse. Blood runs immediately, warm and fast, down into his palm.
The stranger shoves him by the sternum. Uwana stumbles back over a root, catches himself on a trunk.
"Done?"
Uwana tongues blood from where his teeth got his cheek. "No."
He rushes.
The stranger is better than anything Uwana has been in a room with. His blades come out mid-charge—two of them, some material that doesn't hold the firelight right—and the first pass opens the outside of Uwana's left bicep before he registers the arm moving. The muscle pulls wrong. His guard drops on that side and he can't stop it, the nerves just not answering the way they should, and the stranger slips outside and drives a knee into his ribs.
The sound that comes out of Uwana is not a word. Something in there shifted that shouldn't have.
He goes down on one knee. The dirt is warm—still holding the day's heat, or maybe that's just his blood reaching it. He's up before the stranger can move in, but his left arm is dragging and his right is soaked past the wrist from the carved forearm wounds reopening on impact.
Left side's gone. Don't use it. Lead with the right.
He leads with the right. The stranger reads it and angles away, letting the momentum pass, and tags Uwana across the collarbone with the flat of a blade hard enough to split the skin. Long cut, shallow—Uwana feels it burn rather than ache, that specific bright heat of a wound that doesn't know yet how bad it is. Blood soaks the collar of his shirt and keeps going.
Three exchanges like that. Each one Uwana eats damage and watches where the stranger's weight goes, which foot he favours coming out of a pivot, how much he telegraphs the left blade versus the right. On the fourth exchange the stranger comes in with a right-side feint and Uwana ignores the feint, takes the real cut across his forearm rather than stepping back from it, and headbutts him in the nose at contact range.
The cartilage goes with a sound like green wood snapping. Blood hits Uwana's mouth and chin in a spray—hot, iron-heavy, the stranger's, and a lot of it. The man staggers back two full steps with his hand coming up to his face, and for half a second his eyes are just watering and instinct.
Uwana drives a fist into his solar plexus before the half second is up.
The stranger doubles, air out, and Uwana hooks his ankle and puts him on the ground.
Then the Sight turns on.
He can't see it happen—but something changes in how the stranger moves coming off the ground, a quality to it like the air has already told him where Uwana's hands are going. Every opening that appeared in the last four exchanges simply closes. A strike that should have connected grazes. An angle that worked twice doesn't work the third time. Uwana gets a blade across the shoulder that parts muscle to the bone—the pain is enormous and distant at once, his body already doing triage, and his arm responds slower on that side now too.
He catches one across the ribs on the same side as the knee earlier and the creak upgrades to a shriek and he can't get a full breath. At all. He's working in half-lungs, one arm near useless, blood from four open wounds drying into his palms and making his grip unreliable.
The next sweep takes his legs out and he goes face-first into the dirt.
Get up.
He doesn't get up right away. He watches his blood dripping from his carved arm into the dirt, and his vision is doing something it hasn't done before, the edges of the dark going darker, and he breathes as deep as the rib lets him and measures what's still working.
The stranger's weight is on his right foot when he settles. Leans forward slightly when he thinks he has control.
Uwana surges off the ground angled left, not straight, shoulder into the stranger's hip rather than his chest. The stance breaks. They go down together—stranger's footing gone on blood-wet dirt—and Uwana gets an arm around his throat from behind and locks it. Squeezes with everything the rib will allow, which is not much, but the choke doesn't need much if the angle is right.
The blade tip finds the inside of Uwana's thigh. Right over the femoral. Not cutting. Waiting.
They stay there. The forge glow from Okpara reaches the tree line in a thin orange wash. Ash is still coming down.
"You learn fast," the stranger says, voice wrecked and nasal from the broken nose. "Faster than you should."
Uwana loosens the arm a degree. Not releasing.
"Zuberi," the man says. "Seventh prince of Mo'hun. I've spent fifteen years looking for you." A pause—short, like he's debating how much to front-load. "Your real mother is alive. Her name is Nnenna."
The name does something. Uwana can't name what. He stores it.
"Take the blade off," he says.
"Take the arm off."
They let go at the same moment and sit up in the dirt a foot apart, both of them bleeding, neither talking. The night bird in the trees calls twice and stops.
⬥ ⬥ ⬥
Zuberi talks. Power, costs, what the square lit up, what's coming. Uwana listens with his back against a tree and his shirt pressed to the shoulder wound and his eyes on the orange glow past the tree line.
He's on his feet and moving before Zuberi finishes.
At the tree line he stops.
Chidi is at the anvil. Head down. Chest still. The rope charred through at some point—he could have fallen, walked away, he didn't. His palms are flat on the anvil face like he was checking his own work one last time and just never came back from it.
Amara's eyes are closed. Uwana didn't see them close. He was sitting thirty meters away counting the square and her eyes were open and then at some point they weren't and he missed it. Her mouth is still shaped the same way.
Zuberi comes up beside him and says nothing. Looks at what Uwana is looking at.
Then:
"They deserve their final honour. Go. I'll stand watch."
Uwana goes.
He kneels by Chidi first and puts both hands on his father's shoulders and the tears come without any announcement—just there, suddenly, hot and running down his face while he's still upright and completely silent. He doesn't make a sound. That is how it comes out of him. Just heat behind the eyes and the inability to swallow and his hands on a man who taught him to name the thing that killed him.
He stays until his legs go numb.
Then he crosses to Amara, puts his forehead against hers. Stone cold. Her face slack in that particular way that has nothing to do with peace and everything to do with finished. He stays there too, long enough for his own warmth to feel less like a contrast and more like a stubborn fact—he is still generating heat, still here, still the problem no one planned for when they arranged the square.
You said go back. I didn't. I don't know yet if that was right.
He stands. Doesn't wipe his face. Walks back to Zuberi with the tears drying in the cold ash air, wearing them the same way he's wearing the runes and the cuts and the blood that isn't all his own.
"Okay," he says.
Into the trees. Beside Zuberi, not behind. The smoke follows them a long time.