The-Only-Second
A formal challenge required a second — a witness of standing to swear the duel was fair. By the third day Itzel had been refused by every name on the Guild rolls. Disgrace, it turned out, was catching, and no one wished to be infected at a graveside.
She found the last door she would ever knock on by accident, in the rain, outside a wine-shop she had been avoiding for four years. The man inside saw her through the glass and laughed — a bright, hateful, familiar laugh — and came out under the awning to enjoy her misery up close.
Donatien Roche. The man she had spared. The man whose life on her blade-point had ended both their careers, because a duel without a death was a scandal that splashed on everyone who touched it.
"The great Vargas," he said, "begging seconds in the gutter. I'd heard, but I had to see." Then he looked at her properly — at the blade on her hip, at the new-moon date he plainly already knew — and the laughter went out of him like a snuffed candle. "Aurelle. You're answering Aurelle. For a stranger's *name.*" He shook his head slowly. "You haven't changed at all. Still throwing your life away on principle."
"I didn't come to you," Itzel said. "I ran out of doors. You happened to be behind the last one."
"And every other door said no." It wasn't a question. He studied her in the rain, this man who owed her his breath and had hated her for it every day