Draft 2 – Updated 4 April 2026 (C018/D002)
Blocks of granite had been arranged on rising ground to create a semi-circular tiered area above a shallow, stoned-walled pit. Everwoods, rooted on the slope below, towered overhead. People had climbed into them with their jugs to watch the show. Everwood branches, thicker than the trunks of adult oak trees, were stacked with men standing or sitting as width permitted.
Below them in the pit, saloon girls and string players with picks and bows entertained the crowd with music and burlesque. The lower tiers of the cavea were packed to bursting, so Butcher and LT made their way to the higher tiers where the crowd was patchier and they found some vacant space.
“So you’ve never been inside Sewager’s saloon?”
“The group I’m a part of—”
“The Broken Ch—”
“Don’t,” LT snapped.
Butcher stopped speaking, allowing the words to die on his lips.
“Not in public.” LT’s eyes warned. “Not the name.”
“Of course,” Butcher replied, feeling like a child who’d spoken out of turn.
LT relaxed and moved his gaze down to the pit where the burlesque act was wrapping up. “Sewager’s got rules. Used to be . . . his place got broke up a lot on account of sore losers with hot tempers.”
Butcher’s eyes followed LT’s into the ashlar masonry pit where he noticed a hide-clad figure seated on a stool against the far wall. He might have looked more closely at the figure if his eyes had not been immediately drawn to a much larger and more terrifying figure just two steps away.
The hulking swiner—that’s gotta be a swiner—wore the largest ceremonial boar skull Butcher had ever seen. Its lower tusks were longer than his foot. The upper tusks curled back and were, at least, the length of his forearm. And the craftsman who’d painted the skull had to have been a master. Shades of red contrasted blacks and whites, giving it a terrifying underworldly look. Long boarskin robes completed the effect—forcing Butcher to examine the figure several times to convince himself that it was, in fact, a being from his own mortal plane.
“No heathens. No weapons,” LT continued, explaining Sewager’s rules.
“No weapons.” Butcher fleered at the idea. “How does that work in a place like this?”
The dancers were gathering their discarded garments and preparing to leave the pit. Butcher wondered if the towering swiner and his companion were a part of the in-fight entertainment, actors in an upcoming act.
“Honors system,” LT shrugged. “No one gets searched. But draw a weapon once you’re inside the saloon and you’ll run into unhappy consequences.”
“And that happens, does it?” Butcher tapped his coat pocket absentmindedly then squeezed it. Empty.
“Often enough that my people don’t want us going in there—’less the reason for it is pressing.”
As the last of the dancers left the pit, a group of four men in Two Bears uniforms came down the steps in the opposite direction. One stripped to the waist and sat on a stool across from the demon in the boar skull. The others gathered around him. Butcher presumed he was a fighter and the others were his friends, possibly his trainers.
Butcher looked again at the hide-clad figures across the pit. They must be there for the fight. This time he looked closely at both of them. His brow pinched down then lifted. “Is that a woman?” he blurted, pointing.
LT eyes followed his gesture. “That’s Two Blows.”
Butcher snorted, thinking for a moment that LT was joking. Then he realized he wasn’t. It had not occurred to him that Two Blows might be female.
“Seems small for a swiner,” he said, debating if she was actually small or just small in comparison to the hulk standing near her.
“She’s almost as big as you,” LT pointed out. “And she probably weighs more.”
He’s probably right, Butcher realized, swingers are dense.
Two Blows finished eating something, brushed her hands together, and stood. The figure in the boar mask began shuffled from one foot to the other, raising his arms over his head. The movement lifted his robe exposing thick, muscular legs painted a devilish red. He moved around her, bouncing rhythmically. Is he dancing?
“Who’s that?” Butcher asked, patting his coat pocket again, remembering he’d left the jerky in his saddlebag.
“Her brother,” LT replied. “Or her father.” He grinned, shaking his head uncertainly. “Maybe her witch doctor,” he added. “I’ve heard all three.”
Butcher snorted again. “He looks like a bloody demon.”
“I’ve heard that, too,” LT admitted, eyes twinkling.
Swiners intimidated Butcher. It was their tusks that bothered him most. That and the fact that most were bigger than him.
They were said to be no strangers to murder and Butcher had no difficulty imagining that. Running into swiners on a country road was unsettling. Murder, in those moments, always seemed possible. He couldn’t imagine rounding a corner and coming face-to-face with the painted boar skull he could see here today. The thought made him shudder.
“Why do they call her Two Blows?” Butcher asked. A hawker selling sausages on a tier near the entrance caught his eye.
“That’s about as long as her fights usually last.”
The man warming up at the stool across the pit from Two Blows had arrived in a militia uniform. That suggested he was professionally trained.
Butcher examined him carefully. He was young with rippling muscles. He seemed fast and probably agile. He moved like a man who knew how to fight. But compared to the demon in the painted boar skull, he looked like a teenager.
Butcher leaned back, shaking his head. “Why would anyone fight a swiner?”
LT inclined his forehead toward the end of the pit to their left. “To impress them, mostly,” he said.
A dozen men in Company uniforms stood together on the lowest tier. While the bulk of the crowd pressed together jostling drunkenly over space, these men—in their blue coats trimmed with gold—had plenty of elbow room. They smoked cigars, speaking only to each other. While the masses swigged clear moonshine from brown clay jugs, the men in the blue uniforms sipped brown whiskey from clear glass bottles.
“Company men,” LT said. “From Eastbranch.”
John’s eyebrows twitched lower. “How does losing to a swiner help anyone get a job as a deputy?”
LT scoffed, shaking his head. “The Company has an endless appetite for suckers. Anyone dumb enough to fight for a handful of coins when they know they’re about to get their ass kicked is an ideal prospect.”
The young man from Two Bears appeared ready. He stood near his stool ghosting punches in furious, choreographed flurries. His grey-uniformed crew climbed the stairs out of the pit leaving him alone with the swiners.
The oldest of the three recognized someone in the crowd and stopped to talk. It was Hunter. They seemed to know each other.
“Huh,” Butcher said idly, searching the sea of bodies for the sausage hawker who had been gradually drifting his way. “You’d think they’d want winners.”
“When you got numbers like the Company’s got, winners aren’t necessary,” LT said. “They’ll take winners, of course, but winners aren’t the priority.”
“I suppose.”
The militiaman speaking with Hunter wore the grey uniform of Two Bears. He seemed genuinely happy to see the elf. He threw an arm around Hunter’s shoulders and appeared to be introducing him to his friends. What’s this about? John wondered if the man knew Hunter, or if he had him confused with another elf.
“The officers like to keep the winners for themselves,” LT said. “They get their hooks into the good ones. Loan them money. Then make them fight to pay off their loans.”
Butcher hadn’t considered how the fighters made money. He recalled the price he paid for admission and grew suddenly curious. He estimated the number of bodies in the amphitheatre. Then he looked at the men suspended in the everwoods and wondered if they paid anything to watch the fights from there.
A drunk in a burlap tunic, walking along a wide branch suspended six or seven fathoms above the ground, wobbled and then dropped his jug. He nearly fell reaching after it, but another man caught him and pulled him upright. The earthenware jug slipped downward, glanced off of a branch below, and then shattered on a thicker limb below that. It showered the men beneath with clear liquid moonshine.
“So are the fighters paid or is this a prize-money situation?”
The hawker, who had been trending in LT’s direction, suddenly changed course, being waved over by a customer who drew him in the opposite direction.
“Every fight pays,” LT explained. “If you win, you fight again. As long as you keep winning, you keep earning. And if you end the day on top, you get a bonus.”
“So they must hate to see her here.” Butcher smiled, looking back to Two Blows on her stool.
“If she was a regular, they might. But I don’t think she’s here more than a few times a year.”
Two Blows stood. Her demon brother left the ring and moved to a spot on the tier directly above her stool. The crowd there drew back, creating space around him.
Butcher saw the looks on the faces around Too Blows’ brother and remembered the sign on the saloon’s front door. “I’m surprised he lets swiners fight here,” he said.
“Sewager’s not stupid,” LT replied. “Swiners outnumber his militia in these mountains. He knows that Eastbranch can’t get here to back him up.”
Two Blows removed her robe, folding it carefully. Thick cords of muscle flexed in her back and shoulders as she moved. Then she reached up and placed it on the edge of the lowest tier, immediately below her boar-skull-brothers’s large feet.
“No way I’d fight that,” Butcher confessed, eyes settling on the two pairs of tusks jutting from Toopl’s upper and lower jaws. He’d butchered many wild boars and knew how sharp those tusks could be.
“Tough as the mountains they live on,” LT agreed. “Dense muscles, hard as stone. Skin like boiled leather. They never seem to get tired.”
Butcher watched her warming up with kicks and punches. Her opponent was fit and in his prime. He was a bit taller than her. But everything about Two Blows was thicker,meaner. Everything about her was menacing.
“How old is she?” he asked.
“No idea,” LT replied. “Older than me though, I think.”
The smell of sausage drifted into Butcher’s nose, reminding him of the hawker, who was now on the same tier and moving again in his direction.
“She’s a teacher.”
“A teacher?” Butcher’s mouth opened and his brows nearly lifted off of his face. “You know her?”
“Our paths have crossed.”
“You’ve fought?” Butcher ran through a list of places LT might have met her. “Here?”
“Not here.”
“Where?”
“That,” LT replied, looking around, “is something I can’t get into here.”
“You and Hunter.” Butcher snorted. “So many secrets.”
That thought made him look around for Hunter again. He was two tiers below, drifting in their general direction. An elderly man he passed did a double take, appearing to him. He stood and squinted after Hunter for a bit, seeming uncertain.
“They’re not my secrets,” LT replied, “but I am obliged to keep them.”
Hunter glanced up and caught Butcher’s eyes. As he moved toward them, the old man decided to follow.
The sausage hawker was so close that Butcher could nearly taste him.