For all his fanatical devotion to the Aperture Court’s seal diagrams, Assistant Examiner Reth Mal was not blind to the shape of a battlefield when his main attack stalled. Four times in six heartbeats he had driven his chamber-amplified Jade prongs at the western rim of the chalk circle, and four times Daro Kesh had stepped inside the reach of the six-foot shaft to catch the blazing iron on a bare four-inch crossguard wrapped in smoky, side-admitting Early Jade depth.
To break through Daro’s newly proved Jade guard from the front would take at least ten or twelve more full-power exchanges. And inside the chalk circle, ten exchanges was all the time the physician needed to pull the last two coupled silver needles out of sixteen-year-old Halin’s collar and wrist.
Reth’s eyes narrowed as he looked past Daro’s bloodied left shoulder at Mina kneeling on the frost-rimed stone.
Unlike Nara Soth at the northern groove, Daro on the western line, Ilyra on the eastern curve, or Hall Mistress Soran out in the center lane, Mina wore no training armor and projected no martial wake. Her boiled-linen sleeves were rolled to the elbows. Her right hand held a pair of plain iron razor-sharp metal tongs. Her left index and middle fingers rested lightly on the wrist blood vessel of Halin’s inner wrist, reading the delicate coupling between the loosened collarbone pin and the deep wrist anchor. If her hands were forced off the boy’s skin—or if a blade was laid across…
