Chapter 59
Theren almost forgot how impossible it feels to fight Rava Vidar.
Her eyes fix on his, and she pokes her tongue into her cheek, the way she does when she plays chess, and steps into a thrust that’s actually a feint.
He blocks the slash that follows with his vambrace, but only barely; he still feels the tip of her sword catch on his shirt as she withdraws, pivots, and advances again.
She turns him in tight circles, overwhelming him with speed. She may be smaller and weaker than he is, but in every other respect she has the advantage—-speed, experience, technique, strategy.
She cuts again, quick, and he feels blood running down his arm. The pain is lost in the frantic need to press her back again.
She takes apart his skill like she’s disassembling a weapon, making his feet falter and then unbalancing him, so he can’t even muster enough power to threaten her.
She cuts him again, this time in the leg, and deeper, so blood runs hot down his calf.
He gets lucky and ducks under a blow to get away from the wall—-if he lets her corner him, he’s done for.
The only thing he manages to think, as he parries again and again and again, is that she could have won half a dozen times already. But she hasn’t.
“You’re not going to kill me, are you?” he says to her, and maybe he means it as a taunt, but it comes out like a revelation.
“I don’t need to kill you to beat you,” Rava says.
She grits her teeth, and swings so hard that catching the blow against his vambrace sends a painful vibration all the way to his shoulder. She’s warmed up now, ready to batter him into submission, and so he does the thing that feels almost unbearable to him: he buries himself in the feeling of her.
Her vigor fills his chest, her fear gnaws in his stomach, her rage lights up his nerves. And only when he does that, when he loses himself completely in her, can he feel the little flash of insight that precedes every one of her movements.
He steps in time with her, their feet shuffling in unison like they’re partners in a dance. They move through the motions his mother taught him, high guard and low, swords clattering together and pulling apart.
He moves like her, for the first time.
He swings his sword as she withdraws hers, and he can see it, the wide--open stance she just presented to him, as if offering her death to him.
He swings.