Nothing required them to attend the Cogadh matches. The confrontation with Bannamorga and the conference afterward with his slight team had left Dominicus shaky. He had put himself in the position to lead – he knew that – but it was a different thing to actually sit in the seat he had drawn for himself. These were not people he knew – he had to get to know them! – as much as he might have liked to assume that attending the same lessons and taking up the same practices would confer onto them the same skills.
Obviously it didn’t work that way – what had his surety about beating Bannamorga’s ass been about then? – but what Feichín had said about being dependent on one another now echoed about his head like a bird loose in a tall building.
Time was tight – and he knew time was tight! – but now he felt the temptation of Bannamorga’s intent to somehow train up the team to his (stupid, low) standards before they faced a real match. If only Teä could perform such-and-such hold to a higher standard he could face so-and-so in the match, or if Wynn (that was the little one’s name – and he wasn’t little so much as stringy – he was at least as tall as Dominicus when he stood up straight, which wasn’t often – but that still meant he was short for an Ainjir) – if Wynn had a better grasp of this-or-that Grappling technique he could be trusted to perform one-or-another protective position on the field...
It felt very stupid to learn from Bannamorga now, Prophet excuse his pride and ignorance or at least slightly-lacking humility (how was he to know someone so loudly stupid might accidentally have a point?).
As his two (only two!) teammates had assumed, it only made sense he would accompany them to the match, but Dominicus chose not to. He did not tell them why, but let them make their own assumptions (probably dangerous, given the assumptions he had learned that Ainjir made about him). The two parts of his reasoning sat ill together, and there was no reason to make the two of them more nervous about their choices.
One the one hand, there was nothing he could learn from this set of matches that could not be conveyed to him later: Ruaridh, Feichín, Fachtna, Wynn, Teä – any of them could repeat the description of events to him well enough (in fact, he should ask both Wynn and Teä; to evaluate their observational skills...). They would only be told, and not observe, themselves, unless the Second Year class stopped attending First Year matches, which he assumed they would, eventually, just not so early in the tournament. Observing himself would be important, but not at this moment.
On the other, his hands shook. Perhaps it was nervousness, or perhaps it was something about the position he had put himself in, or perhaps it was simply that the deed was done. He couldn’t tell, but didn’t appreciate it. Every time he looked down at their slight tremor he felt like he had pushed his face into a pillow made of his own ignorance and was trying to smother himself to death. He shook his hands out as he walked and cursed – his hands, the Academy, the cadets, the Cogadh, the trees, the leaves, the sky, creation in general, life particularly. The cursing gave him strength: the prayer of his mother.
The benefit to big, disruptive events like Cogadh was that greater measures of peace might be found in the quiet, necessary places of the grounds: the library, the rock field, the classrooms, the showers.
Dominicus chose the showers: he didn’t trust himself to lift heavy things overhead at the moment; he had a plan for finally cracking the Library; the last time he had snuck by a classroom in off-hours, two cadets had been having sex in it and he still hadn’t recovered from his unobserved trespass.
His cheeks immediately heated, embarrassment that it was so driving the heat higher and further up by his temples until he put the backs of his hands against his face to try to either conceal or calm it.
Frustratingly stupid.
A shower would help.
Different facilities for different aspects of bodily cleansing existed about the grounds – a scattering Dominicus found inexplicable and inconvenient. It had been months since had had been able to properly perform the acts which at home had ensured he began each day clean and mindful of God (a small part of him thrilled – he simply began! Each day just began! Immediately! – a much larger part staggered as if drunk, utterly disoriented).
The Ainjir washed when they felt like it; a great deal about their washing was indulgent and Dominicus got the impression from the complaints of his fellow cadets the Academy forced a deeply offensive austerity on them. The only regularity he perceived (and honestly quite liked) was that they rubbed their hands with sand and dipped them in fountains before eating or to clean them of filth.
Fountains! Surely this was a peculiarity of the Academy. Imagine a fountain in his half-frozen little village. They barely had roads, if mud could be counted.
The showers the First Years were permitted to use were also their responsibility, and one they must take seriously as the days grew colder. Nestled in a demure, sheltering little wood nearby the main buildings, the showers themselves amounted to a stone platform over which long rows of pipes with holes in them hung, a flock of wooden outbuildings, and – at a cautious distance – a great, high water tank. Underneath the tank stood an oven – a sheltered stand for a fire, really – whose soot had long since totally blackened the tank and several of the sheds. The First Years were tasked with filling the tank through the pumps, sometimes facilitated by trucked in water, if the season was particularly cold or dry, and starting and maintaining the fire that warmed the water.
Warm water for bathing! And this, they called privation!
Well, ‘warm’ depended on where you stood. Too close to the tank and the water scalded – too far and the best that could be said was that it was warmer than water pumped directly out of the ground.
Cogadh meant there was a chance Dominicus might be able to snag the sweet spot, right in the middle, just slightly closer to the tank than to the end of the platform.
The other nice thing about the showers was that while the facility itself was open to the air, the outbuildings held innumerable accessories – robes, soap blocks, pattens, drying cloths, places to deposit clothes for laundering and hang clothes intended to be worn out, and even an improvised warm room – often too full to use – by the tank for help drying – and Dominicus now had the chance to actually avail himself of some of these things. Maybe he could even carve a chunk off the nice-smelling soap block to use (there was always one, perhaps shipped in by mistake).
So he did not have to return to the dorms to retrieve his own supplies if he didn’t want to, and he didn’t want to. He doubted other First Year cadets would be around, but that only meant the dorms had the eerie emptiness of a dried-out fish skin. He could return after showering and change into clean clothes and then being the next phase of his assault on the Library.
This plan – perhaps having a plan – cheered him such that by the time he reached the showers his hands had stopped shaking and his steps were determined, such that he hardly saw the spare few other occupants of the showers. While it was true that the First Years had limited options for showering, upper classes used what facilities they liked. A scattering of Third Year cadets were using this facility; Doninicus guessed it was nearest their next class.
Indeed, Dominicus was able to store his clothes, throwing what bits needed cleaning into the laundry collection. The good-smelling soap was musky today. The robe he choose and set out for himself was new, bright, and – compared to the threadbare others – almost fluffy. The pattens fit his feet so he didn’t have to awkwardly hold them with his toes or painfully balance on the balls of his feet to walk. He choose the ideal shower head, and opened the stopper that would allow the water to flow out of it, the first chilled splash barely prickling his shins.
Thank God for water, for heat, for time, for peace. As the teachings said, life was only lived in moments, to have absolute knowledge of the past and future was given only to God. Dominicus observed his faith in taking pleasure in this moment, in revelling in the gifts of God, however quietly he did it. This, too, was more the faith of his mother than his father, but his father’s faith would get his due when Dominicus had bent the Library and all its captured knowledge to his will.
Well, maybe the attitude of conquest was a little more like his mother’s faith, but the love of quiet contemplation was all Geronese Midraeic. It balanced out, somehow, he was sure. Anyway, with gratitude he revelled.
Dominicus’ eyes were open, mere slits under the water, but not really seeing. Bodies moved in the blurry distance, near and far. Nobody crowded, as nobody had need to, but a slight dip in the pressure of the water falling on Dominicus brought his eyes sliding over where a few openings away another cadet had started bathing up the line.
A funny thing about the Ainjir – Dominicus had no faith at all in their ability to curb their licentious ways, but the showers were a strictly serious place. They fucked in classrooms the moment one turned around, but here all stood naked out in the open and the highest of sins was to display any overt signs of sexuality. He didn’t understand the rule or how it had been made, only that it had been impressed upon the first years, along with their important duties regarding maintenance of tank and fire, that no sexual activity of any kind was allowed in the showers.
It had shocked Dominicus that anyone would even contemplate it – here? Out in the open? Had the Ainjir no sense of propriety or appreciation for privacy? But that was foolish; even in his limited experience, he knew the Ainjir preferred an open courtship to a hidden one. Why would they not see public space as a perfectly acceptable arena. The things he had seen couples do in public in his village!
Then again, those were mostly couples of men and women. That logic he understood somewhat; Midraeic families preferred courtship take place in the home, where the couple could be supervised, and he supposed neighbors could count as supervision among a people so immodest. But then, for the people of Midras, there were no other condoned relationships. He had never had to puzzle through the logic of modesty and propriety for other... pairings. After all, the point of the coupling of men and women was children, and such was not possible in... other configurations.
The whole thing sat ill on his mind, the simple prohibition of his faith usually enough of a barrier to keep him from dwelling on it.
Dominicus wondered if it had to do with the fact that the few enclosed spaces needed to remain clean – or perhaps it was some heretofore unseen forbidden intersection of sex and cleanliness – or perhaps it had something to do with the danger of trying anything like that in unsteady pattens...
Not that Dominicus knew what ‘that’ was – sure, he had ideas, but even his witness to the cadets in the classroom had been mostly by ear, the only clear sight the nearness of bodies – and such sounds! How did he know what was being done, only from such sounds, except that he had hardly ever heard the like, and they preserved themselves perfectly, somewhere in the back of his mind, to be heard again at the worst possible moments, to try to imagine the configuration required...
Something twitched. Dominicus swallowed, and water flowed down his throat like a stone. He realized he had been staring, lips parted, at a fellow naked cadet for some minutes, slow moving hands holding his chunk of soap, barely keeping up the pretense of washing himself.
And such thoughts...
“Fuck!” Dominicus coughed, choking, and threw a hand up to shut off the valve above him. He banged his fingernails against the metal and then twisted it shut in an awkward grip, forcing him to check his fingertips for cuts.
If the pain hadn’t calmed whatever physical response had started, the brief but unanimous stares he received at his outburst would have. He burned, even though the day was cool and the warm water a mere drip. Thank the Prophet again he had chosen a dark people, were he colored like Ruaridh his whole body would have reddened.
Then the thought of Ruaridh naked came unbidden to his mind and he squeezed his eyes shut, pretending there was some soap in them and that’s what kept him bent over his knees, wishing he could fold inward so ferociously he might crush himself out of existence.
The light conversations and splashy scrubbing sounds among the others continued, and Dominicus stumbled towards the drying room, taking the cloth and robe he had hung out for himself on the way. He had no thought but at least that was covered, somewhat, and if hadn’t got a hold of himself it would give him the chance to do so out of sight.
Naturally, two cadets were already in there.
Dominicus grimaced at them – not on purpose, he couldn’t control what his face was doing – and let his robe hang loosely open to provide more concealment as he bent and pretended he needed to furiously rub dry his hair with the cloth.
“Ah, don’t worry, little pebble,” said one of the cadets, nearly killing Dominicus on the spot, “they’ll take care of that for you soon.”
Dominicus was going to die.
They both laughed, and his companion said, “I can’t wait. The First Year haircuts always drive them just a little mad.”
Dominicus sucked sweet, cold, life-giving air into his lungs. The repeated shocks had effectively calmed his... well. He wasn’t showing anything. And, what’s more, he lived. He could stand and close his robe instead of pretending he had become a bench.
They returned to talk of other things. Dominicus tried to breathe normally and ferociously patrolled his mind to keep it on the border between again receding totally from awareness of the world but also allowing no more thoughts to happen. Obviously he couldn’t be trusted with thoughts, at the moment.
And if he hadn’t been doing that, he wouldn’t have heard where the Third Years were going to practice their advanced joint locks.
Sure, he couldn’t train new skills thoroughly into himself or his teammates before they faced their round of Cogadh. But sometimes one only had to know something that one’s opponent did not to completely control a fight.
To receive such a blessing was perhaps a sign he could skip penance for how he felt, for the moment. Or, at least, that was how he would take it.
“OW OW ow ow ow OW ow,” Wynn said, pulling uselessly against Teä’s grip on his wrist.
“That’s amazing,” Teä said, wild half-grin on his face, looking back at Dominicus and Hal. He had Wynn in front of him, half-bent over, arm stretched up rigidly behind his back, whole body seemingly in his control from a one-handed grip on Wynn’s wrist pushing his hand back up towards his forearm like he was snapping a twig.
“I do not get how you’re supposed to get somebody in that position in the first place,” Hal said. “It seems like it would be easy enough to just... not do that.”
“That is not the point,” Dominicus said.
Teä released Wynn, who after massaging his own write eagerly indicated it was Teä’s turn.
“BloODy Death,” said Teä, put in the same position.
“We are not going to get good enough at these to apply them in battle, on purpose,” Dominicus said, moving in to get Wynn to pay attention to where his feet were. “Not yet.”
“Then what are we doing?” Hal asked, head cocked as if he could right Teä’s arms orientation to his body with just his eyes.
“Yeah,” Wynn said, releasing Teä, who hopped away, massaging his arm, muttering about fate-fucked-mercy’s-taint-glory’s-nipples-battles-blood-and-death.
Teä was very creative.
“Improving our arsenal in unexpected ways,” Dominicus said.
Hal scrunched his face doubtfully. “But you just said we can’t use this stuff.”
“We cannot use this stuff well,” Dominicus clarified. “We will use it when we see the chance.”
“So, wait,” Teä returned, still rubbing his wrist. “How does this help our strategy?”
Dominicus looked at Hal, who met his glance with his own cool, half-lidded one, putting his hands up. “I can leave.”
“No,” Dominicus said.
When he didn’t follow that up with an explanation, all three exchanged glances, and silently elected Teä their spokesperson.
“Sure,” he said, “but...why?”
“Everyone else is secretive because their secrets matter,” Dominicus explained. He gestured for Hal to come closer so he could work through another lock he had seen in the Third Years’ practice as they spoke. They didn’t have the time to waste.
“Inspiring,” Wynn grunted.
“No,” Dominicus said, moving slowly to try to ape the movements he had only seen from a distance, noting Hal’s silent feedback as he worked. “Our great advantage in the next match is that no one knows we are our own team.”
“But...” Teä said, trying to be polite but looking pointedly at Hal.
“We are not matched against his team. Hal learns nothing he would not already know by the time we faced him, should he succeed in his matches.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Hal said, but with good humor, considering he was uncomfortably twisted under a strange kind of bear hug Dominicus had him in, and had to say it with his head upside down. This was obviously not it – they disentangled to try again.
“And he will not talk,” Dominicus said, noting Hal’s expression did not change, though his body lightened. They squared up.
“We cannot plan to apply this or that lock to an opponent, to engage this or that way, because we do not know whether the engagement will even happen. What we can do is arm ourselves with something that, even if misapplied or imperfectly executed, will shock our opponents into being off balance. We are learning the joint-locks not for the next match, but for the match after that.”
Wynn and Teä exchanged a glance, both too heartened by the idea someone thought they could win their first match to want to question the logic, but at the same time...
“Well,” Wynn said, “could you at least... suggest what we’re going to do in our next match? I mean, if like you said, Hal can hear it and everything...”
They almost had the lock. Hal grinned as they parted, ready to see if they could replicate the motions and get the right movements going this time. Dominicus wasn’t certain he could do both – the movements and the talking – so he held a hand up for pause.
“We already have more advantage than we need, in that our actions will be entirely a surprise to both teams,” Dominicus said.
“Both?” Teä asked.
“Bannamorga’s team is as much our enemy as the other team.”
All three other cadets exchanged uneasy glances.
“I mean, Orga is terrible, but some of the others...” Wynn said.
“That is not the point.”
“You know you can call him Orga,” Hal said. “Y’know, like you can call me Hal, Teä, Wynn...”
As he spoke the names Hal gestured to each of them around the circled, eventually holding his hands out to Dominicus as if presenting a sword.
“You may do as you like with your names,” Dominicus said.
That seemed to settle the matter. Or, at least, it settled it for Dominicus, and Hal let his hands drop once he started talking again.
“But this is a good moment,” Dominicus said. “Wynn – will you join B-... Orga’s team?”
“What?”
“I guess ‘Galen’ is short enough,” Hal said to Teä, who shrugged.
“We will know what Orga’s team is planning to do, and build our plan around it.”
“Oh, shit,” Teä said, “They’ll be our distraction.”
That was not precisely how Dominicus would have described it – it wasn’t a distraction in the strictest sense – but he smiled and nodded anyway.
“Sweet Mercy,” Wynn said, bringing a fist up to his chest, a frighteningly deep fire in his eyes, “I’ll be an infiltrator.”
Dominicus nodded, as this was accurate. “Our only problem...”
“...Only problem...” Teä repeated sarcastically.
“...is that we are only three,” Dominicus ignored him. “All of us must make it to the other end of the field and find the cró, and all of us must occupy it until the match is called. The difficulty is not the combat, but the distance crossed and the discovery of what our opponents do not want us to discover, and we haven’t the numbers nor the time to search so extensive an area. If Orga is making the type of plan I assume he is making...”
“A stupid one,” Wynn suggested.
“Well, it could be smart,” Dominicus shrugged, “but I doubt it.”
This seemed to greatly amuse the others, but they couldn’t afford to become too distracted. “Even if it were, Ergamuth is right. The whole team is needed to succeed at Cogadh. The whole team will succeed if we succeed.”
This caused Hal’s head in particular to cock to the side, something like doubt or disbelief writ large in his expression, but to Dominicus it was only logical. The dependence of the cadets on one another bit both ways. He would drag Orga and the team into success kicking and screaming if he had to.
“Our plan will depend on their plan, but to know their plan we must infiltrate their planning sessions. If we all capitulated, it would be too suspicious, and they do not care about me, and Teä is too good at appearing apathetic.”
“Hey,” Teä said weakly, half offended, half thoughtful.
“Wynn will infiltrate and we will meet secretly to train and to build our plan. Our movements will be so shocking the day of the actual match we will have the advantage. After that, it will be up to us to continue to shock our opponents, until we are trained enough that we outmatch them.”
Dominicus said it because he believed it to be true, because he had no wish to hide his plans, or to make them overly complex, because they had to depend on one another, and the more they understood about what they were doing the better off the team would be.
Hal understood that it was the first time since arriving at the Academy that anyone had told Teä and Wynn that they were worthy.
Indeed, they were Ranked – officially Ranked – shortly after the second round of matches. The two Lists – Martial and Academic – were allowed to contain a few surprises, but the List – the combined weighing of both on which each individual stood alone – contained none. The Prep cadets – Cole, Lin, Cruvcrudiach (whose name had become, thanks to Ancient Languages, a modern version of itself: Aspen), Enda, and the rest of their circle took the top ten spots, and eyed one another warily, saying the difference between Eight and Ten was more than that between Ten and Twenty but less than that between Ten and One, regardless of the steps between. That would keep the peace, at least for a short time.
Not a single braile-breith cadet broke the top forty. A few commoners made it so high as the twenties.
At the next round of Cogadh matches, the betting pool now took another flavor, as rank gains and falls affected the odds, and the Second Years departed, as watching First Year matches was beneath them.
The stands were packed with First Year cadets, some furiously making sketches of the fields or taking notes, but the core of the Prep cadets and upper ranks planted firmly and uncaringly in the center of the stands.
“The match will be hardly worth watching,” Lin sighed. “Hardly anyone on the field is above Fiftieth.”
“Oh, it’ll be entertaining,” Cole said, “and we can enjoy the breeze.”
“All the matches give us something to learn from,” Aspen said.
“Please,” Enda snorted. “Nobody’s got a chance of stopping you because at some point they’ll have to beat you, and you wiped the floor with the Combat rankings.”
Aspen tried not to show how this flattered his pride, but also, nobody objected, as it was simply the truth.
“This view is still pretty bad,” Kiso observed. He had smuggled food from somewhere – painfully under spiced ‘bitas some cadet must have been selling on his own initiative. But Cole did kind of want some. He missed city food.
And that why he couldn’t have any.
“Better than the ground,” he said.
At the edge of the field, Orga stomped over to the two exiles, putting his finger in Dominicus’ face. “If I even see you two away from the cró, I’ll beat you down before the other team has a chance. You fuck this up for me, I’ll be on your asses until you quit the school. Got me?”
They said nothing. Wynn watched impassively, joining in when the rest of the team nudged each other and laughed to get their spirits up before the contest started.
Dominicus, as dawn broke, had run up into the stands to get a look at the field as the light spilled over it. They were carefully kept from it on all but Cogadh days. He had bare moments to make it back to the class muster before Cogadh on time, but the beating he might have earned would have been worth it. A few other cadets – at least one he knew was on the other team who started upon recognizing Dominicus, also waited there. But none from Orga’s team.
Possibilities brewed like storm clouds in Dominicus’ mind. There were a thousand places he could think to place the cró, a bare ten foot square space in field seventy by fifty yards, and thousand variables that would change that placement depending on what the ground was like under the cover of the trees.
Cadets were predictable, though – especially First Year cadets. And once the game started, the sky swept clean in his mind. He could only guess, and only a few guesses made the most sense, and if he was wrong: fuck it.
He and Teä left the cró almost immediately as Orga’s team was out of sight, and calmed the furious yelling of the ‘teammate’ they left behind with the warning that he would give away their own cró placement if he kept it up. Wynn waited at approximately the spot they had decided in their plans, impossible to place exactly but judged relatively by how far into the field they got.
The two teams were hunting each other down, hoping to stumble on advantageous ground or hidden weapons, acting aggressively because taking the initiative was a winner’s strategy, and a defensive victory, in the Cogadh, was hardly a victory at all (plus, they would have to be sure they could best every member of the other team in combat, and few First Year cadets, certainly no low-ranked cadets, were so sure of themselves).
It was all very sensible, and very stupid. Or, Dominicus thought as his tiny team of three moved quietly through the brush, not so much stupid as uncreative. Very safe.
So it was with some thrill – something like admiration, or perhaps just excitement, much more than surprise, though they were surprised – his team ran into a couple of cadets from the other team attempting to gain a flanking position on Orga’s team. Dominicus, before anyone else had time to react, shot from the bushes and tackled one, so shocking the other that his partner had nearly tapped out, his token already in Dominicus’ hand before he reacted. By the time he did, it was too late, Dominicus was ready for him, too.
They could not afford the noise, but by then, the two main teams had joined in battle. Orga, rather than doing as the other team was doing and taking time to evaluate the ground, was throwing his whole team at the other. Surely there would be others on the other side of the field trying to flank them – or perhaps that was why there were two here, there would be no bodies to spare for the other side – if they did, they would succeed. Orga’s team would be surrounded and go down in a blaze of idiotic glory.
It was probably going down in a blaze of idiotic glory without being flanked. But it suggested few cadets to spare to cover the cró.
They could not wait.
Dominicus and his team abandoned stealth – they would not be seen by anyone who mattered – and tore across the heavily wooded field. At the designated point, they fanned out, each now searching.
Achingly long went by – Dominicus had no idea if it was minutes or hours, though the whole match could only last two hours at most. He found nothing, becoming increasingly incautious of ambush as he stumbled through the bushes.
One high-pitched whistle sounded off to his left.
Dominicus sprinted, sheared by brambles and threatened by every pitch in the ground.
“...excellent, I didn’t think we would get the chance to get any tokens!” A cadet was saying ahead, in a well-concealed clearing, its camouflage carefully added to with extra branches. Wynn sat on the ground, expression devastated, as the two cadets stood over him. On the ground lay a golden rope.
Dominicus shot through the bushes a second time, and threw himself bodily onto one of the cadets, who screamed like a child tossed into a cold pond. He was not so lucky this time, as they were meant to be on defense and so expected attack. He had to roll away before the other cadet could descend on him.
“Come on, Galen! Get ‘em!” Wynn yelled.
“The dead aren’t supposed to talk!” One of the defenders yelled back, ducking under a strike from Dominicus.
“This isn’t fucking neighbourhood games!” Wynn yelled back.
“Virtue’s Tits!” yelled the other defender, as Dominicus pressed an attack on him, only breaking it off when the other cadet started to close again.
“Hold ‘em off, Galen!” Wynn yelled, but this time one of the corps of black-cloaked judges entered the field and touched a finger to lips to give the official ruling on whether the ‘dead’ could talk.
Both defenders pressed in; Teä arrived out of breath, but threw himself into the fight. He was beaten back almost immediately, unable to quite get air enough to do more than absorb the attacks of his opponent, but it gave Dominicus the spaced he needed. He knocked down his opponent and forced concession, receiving the token that indicated his defeat. Teä had fallen to the ground, curled up to avoid being forced to concede but taking quite a few hits in the process. Dominicus pulled his opponent off him and threw him across the clearing.
Two on one.
But now that he was given the space, the defending cadet gave his own signal whistle, this one much more complex. Teä looked at Dominicus.
“Two to take,” Dominicus said.
He moved forward, but as he guessed, the other cadet was not stupid enough to engage fully. He kept slightly out of Dominicus’ reach, waiting for his reinforcements to arrive.
It was sheer dumb luck that those reinforcements were the main body of the opposing team – or what had survived the engagement with Orga’s team.
It was even stupider that trailing after them came Orga, and what remained of his team.
Did any of them take this seriously?
“What the fuck are you doing here?” Orga yelled, instead of doing anything at all useful.
“Teä, hold the cró!” Dominicus yelled. “Orga, take it!”
Dominicus threw himself at the three, now four with the defender added, members of the other team. The two of Orga’s team that had come with him also engaged. Orga hesitated, but seeing the ferocity of Dominicus’ attack, and Teä taking up a defensive stance in the spot of glory, ran to join to Teä.
Whatever their failings, the other team was not stupid, and worked together well. Dominicus obviously accounted for the greatest threat, and they sent most of their team after him, meaning he was shortly overwhelmed, driven to the ground, and forced to concede. It was sheer misfortune that that didn’t happen without losing the advantage on the remaining members of Orga’s team, who took out enough of them that the balance soon became obvious. Down to two to Orga’s three, and that third positioning himself in the cró with his two now well-rested teammates, the match was called.
Dominicus, and through him, Orga, had won. And Orga would never forgive him.