Page 83 of Raven’s Fight

The acid is directed. The narrow, concentrated stream I can produce when the dragoness is fully forward and the intent is exact. Not the indiscriminate kind. This is a tool with a purpose — break the change, collapse it, take the threat away without taking the person. Balor was very particular about that distinction. The Purge permits killing. That doesn't mean every fight requires it.

It hits him center mass.

The change collapses. He goes down on the upper landing, everything his body had been building for the shift suddenly going sideways in him, and the sound he makes is not one I will forget quickly. He will be in a great deal of pain. He will not be able to shift for a week. He will be found. He will live.

The green dragon turns around.

✦ ✦ ✦

He's bigger than me in human form.

Not by much — he's a fourth-year, built for it, four years of Shadowcarve visible in how he moves as he turns. He reads the landing in about a second. The fire drake down. Me above him, scales up along my forearms. And he does the arithmetic fast. I'm smaller. I've just spent a great deal of acid. I have a second problem on the upper landing. He has a blade, he has four years, and he has the momentum of a fight he was winning until forty seconds ago.

He is wrong about all of it except the blade and the four years.

He starts moving and I let him. The thing Balor teaches about a committed opponent — someone who has chosen the fight and is already inside the choosing — is that trying to turn him before he arrives works far worse than using what he brings with him. You wait for the commitment. You don't argue with it. You put it somewhere else.

He closes.

He has four years of training.

He has been fighting my sister in a stairwell for twenty minutes.

I have been fighting since the bell, and the dragoness has been fully forward for an hour, and my shoulder is burning, and the anger I have been banking since the beginning of all of this is, at this precise moment, exactly where it needs to be.

The movement is from the third session of Year Two Advanced Shadowcarve. The one Balor showed us once and then made us run until it lived in the body instead of the head. It needs full talons, a particular entry angle that borrows his momentum rather than meeting it, and total commitment. There is no careful version. You do it or you don't.

I do it.

It works because it doesn't oppose force. It takes force and finishes the sentence. His own forward motion becomes part of the movement, and the talons meet the commitment rather than the man arriving.

It takes four seconds.

He doesn't get up.

I stand in the stairwell and let the dragoness settle and look at what I have done. The Purge permits lethal engagement. Those are the institution's words, and they cover this the way a sheet covers furniture. I think about Finlay's rite — the acknowledgment that has to be in my own words, the accounting of what was there before and what is gone.

I think: fourth-year. Shadowcarve. Blade. Chose to corner my sister. Chose to stay while she was bleeding. Made his arithmetic about me and was wrong about what I am.

The formal record will carry his name and the circumstance and the date. My words will have to carry what I saw in his face in the second before he came — the look of someone who has decided and is past the place where deciding can be undone. He was past it before he turned around. I didn't make this outcome. I finished it.

I will write it honestly.

After.

✦ ✦ ✦

Bella is staring at me.

Her face is doing several things at once, and I know every one of them, because I have known this face since we were children in the same nest. What she saw. What she is choosing not to show about what she saw. What she is choosing not to say because we are standing inside an active Purge and this is not the moment. Bella's particular intelligence has always been for reading rooms. She knows this isn't the moment.

"Are you hurt?" I say.

She opens her mouth. "You just⁠—"

"Are you hurt?"

A beat. Something in her face settles into the thing she's choosing. "My arm."