Page 86 of Raven’s Fight

"The language is vague. Any tribunal would throw it out. We both know that."

"Perhaps. But vagueness is its own kind of permission." She's at my two o'clock now, not quite in front. "You've been thorough this Purge. More thorough than I expected."

"What did you expect?"

"Callan's approach. Patient, strategic, as little engagement as possible until the moment is right. You don't engage as little as possible."

"I engage appropriately. What counts as appropriate got larger."

A pause. She's weighing whether that's honest or bait. "The contacts. Both eyes, or one?"

"You'll have to keep guessing."

"The right." One of the snakes stretches toward me as she says it, out past the others, weaving, its blunt head tasting the air between us with a tongue I can see at the edge of my vision. "What I carry sits low. Your lenses are turning back something low. The left is almost certainly clear, which makes your right side the way in, and you have not looked right once since I arrived."

The analysis is almost entirely correct. I note that it's almost entirely correct and I hold where I am.

"Very good," I say.

"Then why aren't you turning to face me?"

"Because what you just described is your best reading of my weakness from the evidence available. I've been providing the evidence for three months."

A silence, longer than the others. She's rebuilding.

Then she tries the lunge.

It's fast and well made — the forward surge with the voice coming up under it, built to trip the startle that happens before you can decide anything. She uses it in class. I've watched her use it. I have never once startled in the year I've known her, and I don't start now.

My eyes stay on the east wall.

"You knew that was coming," she says.

"I've watched you do it nine times. The tell is in the breath. You take a slightly deeper one first. Nine out of nine."

Another silence.

"We can go to the end of this," I say, "or you can work through the rest of them. I've thought about all of them."

✦ ✦ ✦

She comes at me properly at the sixty-ninth hour.

Not a lunge. A real fight, the full commitment of a gorgon who has decided the talking is finished. She's fast — faster than her classroom movement suggested, which is no surprise, because good practitioners always keep more than they let students see. She has a blade and she has carried one for decades, and she knows how to build the shape she needs: any position where looking at her stops being a choice.

I don't give her the shape.

This fight isn't about strength and it isn't about speed. It is about one rule. My eyes do not go above her jaw. Everything she does is built to lift them past that line. Everything I do is built to keep them under it. Which means tracking her by sound and by the edge of my vision, reading her blade off its shadow and the way it moves the air, feeling the gather in her posture before the movement rather than watching for the movement.

The snakes make it harder than the blade does.

They move on their own and they do not follow her body. When she strikes low the whole crown of them rises instead — high, weaving, mouths open — and every instinct in a living thing says look up. That's the trap. The blade is honest. The snakes are the lie.

She feints left and drives right. I follow the drive, not the feint. Eyes on her collarbone.

She goes high, blade overhead, the movement that pulls a gaze up almost by itself. I track the blade's shadow on the flagstones. Eyes on her sternum. She lands without her angle.

Something strikes my ear on the second pass. Not the blade. One of them — small, and hot, and gone again before I can register it as a bite, and then the whole side of my throat starts burning in a way that has nothing to do with the shoulder.