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I snort. “I’m not sure why it matters when you didn’t come close to touching me regardless.”
Benedikt and Casimir have pulled back to the edges of the room. Alek retreats from the desk, his lips pursing beneath his mask. “Do we really need to do thishere?”
“I won’t damage your precious archives, scholar,” Stavros says. “Don’t worry, it’ll be over soon enough.”
Oh, he thinks so, does he?
He springs forward again with a little more respect, feinting to one side and pivoting in the other direction. I have to skid across the floor even lower to avoid a blow, but I slide by close enough to rap the grip of my knife against his muscular calf. “First blood.”
Symbolically, anyway.
Stavros mutters a curse, but a fierce light has come into his eyes that’s almost giddy. It gives him a maniacal air that sets off a peal of warning through my nerves.
He gives his head that odd tiny shake again, and I frown at him. “What are you doing when you twitch your head like that?”
His grimace-y grin widens. “Let’s stay on topic.”
Of course, Julita knows.It’s because of his battle injury. It messed with his sight. He can’t fully focus on anything for more than a second or—
I miss the rest of her answer and any chance to ponder the implications of the former general being partly blind when Stavros barrels forward.
It’s clear in an instant that he was holding back before. I hope to the gods he isn’t even now.
He jabs left and right, shifting on his feet to block my escape, corralling me into a corner. I’ve never faced an opponent like this.
My heart thumps faster. I flick out my knife to deflect a swipe of his sword that would have sliced open the bare skin above my shift’s collar if he wasn’t going to temper the strike. The impact reverberates through my bones.
Heisgoing to pull his punches, right? Surely he isn’t planning to actually spillmyblood.
It’s getting harder to tell. Up until this point, my magic has kept to a persistent but low-level nagging, knowing I asked for this fight, that it’s not meant to be actually threatening. Now my power starts to prick more deeply at my innards for me to bring it to bear.
I make a few more testing jabs, but Stavros deflects all of them, coming on like a windstorm. I don’t have much choice but to vault onto the desk and leap from there right over his head.
One of the other men takes a sharp breath, but even that move doesn’t faze Stavros. He’s whirled around before my feet have even smacked into the ground. I nearly trip over them scrambling away from his renewed onslaught.
Gods above, he is a warrior through and through. I might admire his skill a little if he wasn’t attempting to belittle me with it.
Despite my sparse clothing, sweat trickles down my back. I feel like I’ve held my own far better than he could have expected—well enough to prove I don’t deserve his mockery.
But he’s still going to look down his nose at me if he wins, as if I can be blamed for not having the might of a war-hardened soldier.
If this were a real fight, if I thought I was battling for my life, I’d have already flung my knife into his chest or his gut. It’s a little hard to prove that without dealing a potentially fatal wound, though.
Well, sometimes a draw is plenty good enough to settle the score.
I weave and bob, but Stavros is boxing me in even more tightly than before, and there’s no handy desk at this end of the room. I can feel the impending moment when he’ll bowl me right over.
At any second, my power will attempt to disembowel me for ignoring its demands to help.
So I push into his attacks instead, picking my time, embracing the fight for my own purposes.
Stavros shoves me against the wall with his prosthetic hand. My right arm jerks up against his other wrist to slow the slice of his sword toward my throat.
Aiming the full intensity of his wild grin at me, he presses against my blocking arm to show how easily he could overcome my strength with the power of his bulging shoulders. His scent wafts over me, heated with a smoky peppery bite.
This close, I realize there’s something chaotic about his dark eyes too. The ring of deep brown around the pupil blends into a rich blue around the edges, as if his makers couldn’t quite decide what color they should be.
If he truly can’t focus his gaze that well, he’s doing a damned good job of faking it.
