The Green Bone Saga 1 : Jade City by Fonda Lee

Author:Fonda, Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2017-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

30

The Temple of Divine Return

The odor of cut grass and sweet roasted figs permeated the thuds and grunts of the relayball game and the occasional gasped exclamation or murmur of appreciation from the crowd. Shae picked her way into a section of the low bleachers populated by Kaul Du Academy fans and settled into an empty seat. Glancing over at the scoreboard, she saw that the game was close. The Academy was a martial school where physical prowess was revered, but the wearing of jade was not permitted in professional sports. The opposing team was from a large city school that regularly turned out national league players; they were surely eager to show up future Green Bones.

Shae searched for her cousin and barely recognized him at first. He was no longer the awkward kid she remembered. Anden had filled out with an adult Green Bone’s physique. He was wearing dark shorts and playing first guard, sticking tight to his opponent as the ball sailed into their zone. The other player leapt to kick it to a teammate, but Anden, both taller and faster, smacked it out of the air. The two teens collided and went down in a tangle as the ball bounced into the net. The whistle blew for the ball to be rethrown.

A relayball field consists of seven zones separated by waist-high nets—five rectangular pass zones and two triangular end zones. Each zone is occupied by two players, one from each side, who are not permitted to leave their enclosed space as they attempt to throw, hit, kick, or bounce the ball off their body to their teammates down the field, zone to zone, over the nets to the opposing team’s end zone, where it is the job of the finisher to put the ball between the guardian’s point posts. As the game is essentially a series of violent one-on-one skirmishes, ample opportunity exists for personal as well as team enmity. As Anden got to his feet, the opponent in his zone glared at him and spat some insult at his back. Anden did not deign to turn around and react. He bent his knees, ready, squinting into the horizontal orange light of the setting sun.

The ball flew straight up from the referee’s hands. Anden jumped to shoulder check the other player, reaching with one arm to seize the ball and hurl it over the net to his teammate in the instant before he was tackled to the ground. Shae stomped her feet appreciatively along with the crowd. She was impressed by her cousin’s grace and aggression on the field, his workmanlike athleticism. He seemed to approach relayball as a duty, not a game—he took little outward satisfaction in a good play and grimaced only faintly after bad ones. Already, she could picture him as a Green Bone, one of No Peak’s Fists.

She was not alone in this. In the row behind her, someone said, “The Academy first guard there—that’s the Mad Witch’s boy, the one the Kauls took in.

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