For three slow breaths Daro Kesh stood motionless in the center of the burial house courtyard. That turned Seyun’s proposed rules over in his mind the way a veteran smith taps an iron bar to listen for hidden cracks. He didn’t look at Ilyra or Mina. His dark eyes measured the width of Seyun’s shoulders, the slight inward protection of his right elbow. The thick linen bandages wrapped around both of his palms.
In Daro’s twenty years of holding and teaching the straight sword, he had seen every trick an overmatched fighter used to stretch out a bout in a guild ring. He had seen agile Coal and Flame foot-fighters try to circle the outer edge of a yard, throwing dust or ducking behind pillars to waste the sand-glass. Yet Seyun had placed the target in the exact sharp-angled center of a thirty-foot square. If the boy ran circles around the outer chalk line to save his skin, he would leave the hanging brass cage wide open after the first stride. To stop Daro from touching the center cage, Seyun would be forced to put his own body across the shortest chord between Daro’s point and the stone.
And a consolidated Bronze sword-plane locked onto a stationary object six feet above the ground. Then, the distinction between cutting through the defender and touching the cage behind him was, in Daro’s experience, no distinction at all. A boy one day into Flame with a four-tenth-inch mantle on his blistered hands couldn’t…
