Conducted three days after the tournament. The subject asked not to be named and gave no reason, which for Ironvale is unusual enough to record. My own notes, made at the time, are in brackets.

(She wasn't a duellist. Her sword was work-worn, her gloves were creased at the knuckles, and she wore no tournament colours. She'd come to watch a friend compete and stayed for the rest. When I asked if she'd talk about what she'd seen she looked at me for a while before she nodded. She seemed reluctant. We sat on a bench by the practice yards, and she chose the end that didn't face the arena.)

Scholar: You watched all six matches.

Witness: All six.

Scholar: What did you see?

Witness: Everybody's asked me that since, and I haven't given a single one of them a decent answer.

(She turned the sword over across her knees, hilt to point and back, the whole time she said this.)

Witness: I don't know what I watched. Twenty-six years I've been doing this and I can normally tell you what happened in a bout and why. I can't do it with these.

Scholar: Take the last one, then. Your own duellist.

Witness: Right.

(A pause.)

Witness: He's good. Write that down, because there are people saying he embarrassed the House and not one of them was there. Nine wins. Textbook forms. Textbook's a compliment where I come from, it means the thing works.

Scholar: And it didn't work.

Witness: It didn't do anything at all.

(She stopped moving the sword.)

Witness: When you lose a bout your technique gets beaten. Someone's faster, or they've read you, or they've got something you've not seen and you eat it and you learn. That's fighting. This wasn't. His fire went out.

Scholar: Cross put it out.

Witness: If he'd put it out I'd understand it.

(Her jaw worked before she went on.)

Witness: His edge was burning, and then burning wasn't occurring, and that was before Cross touched the blade. I was forty feet off. I saw it, so did everyone in that row, and we've all been arguing since because none of us wants to be the first to say it out loud.

Scholar: What is it nobody wants to say?

Witness: Well, you'd think it was done to the fire.

Scholar: And it wasn't?

Witness: It was done to him.

Scholar: Go on.

Witness: He's told people. He's making no secret of it, he's told half of Greytower by now.

(She looked at her hands.)

Witness: Last half second of that match he couldn't feel his connection. He says it wasn't clamped or blocked, there was nothing to strain against. It was just gone. Then Cross stepped back and it came back.

Scholar: Has that happened to anyone before?

Witness: Never. Not to anyone.

(She said it slowly.)

Witness: I've stood in the Chiming Snow when the void does things nobody has a word for. I've never once heard of a person's connection simply going missing for a second because somebody was standing close to them.

Scholar: Could it be a technique Ironvale hasn't published?

(She laughed, and it wasn't a nice laugh.)

Witness: You've been talking to Vaulin.

Scholar: I've been talking to everyone.

Witness: They've decided it's one of ours, and they keep coming back to it. They're polite about it, and I can see why they land there. Cross fought quiet and direct, wasted nothing, and that looks like us.

(She shook her head, once.)

Witness: It isn't us, and you can quote me. There's nothing in Ironvale that does it, in the halls or the yards or the work we don't publish, and I have seen the work we don't publish. It looks like work. You can watch it being done and you can see what it costs. Nobody out there was doing anything.

Scholar: Nothing at all?

Witness: I know how that sounds. They beat five practitioners and a nine-win duellist, and as far as I could see they never did anything.

Scholar: Your best guess, then.

Witness: Haven't got one.

Scholar: Most people give me a guess anyway.

Witness: Most people weren't near them.

(She picked a stick up off the ground and put it down again.)

Witness: I got within about fifteen feet on the stand steps after. He was going out, I was coming down, we crossed. I've heard what everyone else is saying, mind, and I don't want to just repeat it.

Scholar: Say it your own way.

Witness: There was a hole.

(She didn't say anything else for a while.)

Scholar: Cold, people keep telling me.

Witness: It wasn't cold. There was a person walking past me and there was nothing there. Everyone's got something, even the mundane in the seat beside me had something. Everything alive has something. He had a shape and a sword, and nothing else.

Scholar: What did you do?

Witness: Got out of the way.

(She said it flatly.)

Witness: Twenty-six years. I've stood in front of things out of the void with teeth like fence posts, and I've never wanted to be somewhere else the way I wanted it on those steps. I'm not proud of it.

Scholar: Last thing. Other Houses think Ironvale is sitting on a technique. What would you tell them?

Witness: That I wish we were.

(She stood up, which ended it.)

Witness: If that was a technique then somebody somewhere knows what it is, and somebody could teach me to answer it. I'd go and learn it tomorrow, and I'd pay what they asked without haggling.

Scholar: And if it wasn't a technique?

Witness: Then there's something walking about that can switch off a person's connection, and it put a made-up name in a tournament book for three hundred marks it didn't come back for.

(She pulled her gloves on.)

Witness: I can't decide which of those I'd rather was true.

Scholar's note. I tried afterwards to find Cross through contacts at Greytower. Nobody would confirm a name, an origin or a direction of travel, and most of them, I think, genuinely knew nothing. One armorer told me: "If they wanted finding, they'd be where you could see them. They're not. That should be enough for you."