Amara drew her sword even as she came to her feet and raised it to a high guard position. She found Cantus Macio staring at her with blank eyes.
"Macio," she said, her voice shaking. "Hello. Do you remember me? From the Academy? Amara?"
He tilted his head, watching her.
Then he lifted his hand, and fire rushed at her in a swirling vortex.
Amara called to Cirrus, raising a wall of wind to stop the onrushing fire, but Macio was simply far more powerful than she. The rush of wind shoved back against her with tremendous force as it tried to slow the onrushing firestorm, and Amara found herself tossed back like a leaf.
Rather than fighting the motion, she spun into it, calling out to Cirrus again to take to the air - only to see the shimmer of something moving behind a windcrafted veil, and to feel a shock of stunning pain as an unseen fist slammed into her jaw.
Amara staggered, her concentration upon maintaining flight shattered, and tumbled down. Fortunately, she'd had little time to gather altitude or speed, but even so, her landing upon the hard stone of the plaza was an acutely painful experience. Training let her turn her motion into a rolling one, but it still slammed her limbs brutally. Her weapon was knocked clear of her hand, and she counted herself lucky not to have wound up impaled on it.
She struggled to push herself up, panicked. Speed was her only chance. She didn't have the power she would need to confront Macio and his veiled ally directly. The only way she could survive would be to take the battle to the open skies. She found the wall of one of the buildings framing the plaza and used it to help herself stand.
She had risen to her knees by the time Macio's fist tangled painfully in her hair. He dragged her up with fury-born strength, lifting her flailing toes clear of the ground.
Her arms felt like they'd been weighted with lead. She drew the knife from her belt and drove it up and back at the arm holding her. If she could cut the tendons, it wouldn't matter how much earthcraft Macio knew - the mechanisms of his arm would be broken, and his grip would be gone. The cut slid off something rigid, probably the chitin-armor that encased Macio. Twisting her shoulders, she thrust one heel down at him, aiming for the knee. The blow struck home, but suspended as she was, it was weak. Macio grunted and shifted his weight, and her next two kicks hit what felt like this armored thigh, doing him no harm.
Amara felt Macio's arm surge with power and slam her into the stone wall behind her. Her teeth snapped together on her tongue as her back and shoulders hit the stone. The taste of blood filled her mouth. Stars clouded her vision, and her limbs hung limp and flaccid.
Move. She had to move. Speed was her only chance.
Macio drew his sword with a deliberate motion, frowning up at her as he did. Then he set the sword's tip against her ribs, just beneath her left breast. It would be a thrust to the heart.
"Amara," he said, his voice that of someone who has recognized a former acquaintance at a dinner party. He nodded to himself, then said, "There's no more Academy, you know." His fingers tightened on the sword's hilt. "I'm sorry."
Chapter 21~22
Chapter 21
Amara watched Macio's eyes. They were clinically detached as he angled the blade for a thrust between the ribs and took a breath. In the instant before he pushed the weapon forward, she twisted to the side, drawing in her stomach as hard as she could. She could feel the edge of the sword burn a single hot line along her belly, but she was able to lash out with her fist and land an accurate, if weak, blow to the bridge of his nose.
Macio rocked back from the strike, blinking involuntary tears from his eyes - and then abruptly turned his upper body, his sword sweeping up and back as though it had a will of its own. There was a crack of impact as something struck the blade, and a small cloud of spinning fragments of wood rose up from it.
Wild hope surged through Amara, blazing through her body. The extra heartbeats the distraction had given her were time enough to sort out her terrified, stunned thoughts. She called upon Cirrus to lend her the fury's speed and watched the world slow around her. Even as it did, she swept the knife up again in the strike she should have used in the first place, cutting not at Macio's arm but at her own hair where he held her.
The sharp knife parted her hair without slowing, and she fell free of his grip. She dropped to the ground and dived to one side. She saw his sword moving again, lazily graceful in the expanded time sensation of her windcrafting. A long, lean arrow fletched with green and brown feathers glided toward Macio's head. The collared Citizen intercepted the arrow with his blade, and a second cloud of splinters flew out. Macio's sword continued its plane of motion, driving toward Amara with almost-delicate grace. Her own body moved just as slowly, but she was able to slap the flat of the blade with her hand as its tip drove toward her abdomen, and the sword plunged past her to bite deep into the stone wall.
Amara rolled over one shoulder, gathered her legs together beneath her as she did, and came to her feet with an explosive leap. Cirrus rushed into the air beneath her, bearing her up and away from Macio, avoiding the return sweep of his blade by the width of a finger.
The plaza sat nestled deep between the high buildings of Riva, and she could feel Cirrus straining as her fury struggled to move enough stone-smothered air to take her into the open sky. The center of the plaza would have been a better location for a takeoff, but she could not possibly approach it through the ring of enormous furies still crouched there. Instead, trapped at the edge of the plaza, she lifted from the ground too slowly and was forced to stop trying to gain altitude before she struck the side of the building that was her goal.
She grabbed a windowsill with one hand, drove the toes of her left foot against another, and, bolstered still by Cirrus, began to ascend the side of the building in an almost-spiderlike fashion.
The presence of so much stone, which had limited Cirrus, would also have afflicted Macio's wind furies - and the young man must have weighed nearly a hundred pounds more than she did. A quick glance over her shoulder showed her Macio sprinting toward her - but instead of employing windcrafting to pursue her, he let out a grunt and leapt explosively, drawing upon an earthcrafter's strength to send himself hurtling up nearly three stories in a single bound. Eyes locked on Amara, he sank his fingertips into the stone as if it had been soft clay, and with earthcrafted power, he began scaling the building even more quickly than she could.
Amara reached the top barely a breath ahead of Macio, caught her belly on its edge, and struggled desperately to haul herself fully onto the roof.
An iron grip settled on her ankle.