The sting across his right knuckles was sharp and immediate—not heavy enough to crack bone before the twelfth night, but hard enough to make his fingers tingle against the wood.
Seyun didn’t drop his staff. His Deeper Bronze Answering Edge absorbed the shock along the grain of his pole so his stance didn’t collapse. He slid half a step back to reset his guard.
“Breath three,” Nara said calmly, already gliding toward the right-hand wooden frame. “You built a very handsome roof over a flat stone slab with nobody on it.”
She struck the right timber high near the cross-brace, drawing a steep downward rebound.
This time, Seyun swore to himself he wouldn’t assume she would take the textbook right-hand pocket. He watched the drop of her right shoulder as the wood shook. He deduced that she was preparing to duck low to the left again as she had on the first exchange. Before her boot even cleared the flat stone slab, he shifted his Returning Step across the center line and angled his Answering Edge low toward the left gap to meet her there.
Nara didn’t duck left. Seeing a patch of dry barley chaff on the left stone that would make a one-armed recovery slower, she took two short, straight hops directly backward toward the southern curb. And Seyun’s staff swept past her front knee to guard the left gap she had ignored. Then, her ash pole dropped out of the high rebound and tapped the outside of…
