“Ready, Rivers?” Raven didn’t answer him.
The Headmaster took that for answer enough, turned the sandglass on its stand, and let the first grains fall.
“Your restrictions stand, Prymont.
Begin.” Dante stood between Raven and the shielded marker with his arms hanging loose at his sides.
No stance or raised guard.
He’d tucked one thumb into his belt like a man waiting for a friend outside a tavern, and his mouth still carried the edge of that laugh.
An insult she could have used.
This was worse.
Every other person on that wall would have squared up against a first-year with a training blade, but the Cardinal Heir couldn’t be bothered to lift his hands for her, and the sand was already running.
Her ankle had settled into a dull throb.
Her ribs pulled with each deep breath, her right arm still buzzed from the sigil, and the only thing she owned in this fight was the plain knife warming in her grip.
Dante had given up his Lattice, his sigils, his weapon — and standing there loose and smiling, he looked like a man who’d noticed none of it missing.
She didn’t charge.
She moved left instead, a slow arc along the court’s edge, keeping the marker in the corner of her eye.
Dante turned with her.
Barely.
A half-step here, a shift of weight there, and each time she checked, the marker had a Cardinal Heir in front of it again.
She quickened, changed height, drifted as if to cross the center — the same lazy corrections, the same result.
She darted left, planted hard, and cut back toward his right.
His hand found her forearm before she saw it leave his side.
There was no jerk and no pain, just her own speed suddenly belonging to him, and by the time her boots finished scraping across the stone she was four steps from where she’d aimed to be and farther from the marker than when she’d started.
He let go at once and walked back to his spot with a smirk on his face.
Raven came in again, knife out this time.
She drove the point at his ribs, broke the line halfway, and tried to roll around his left.
Dante swayed off the blade by a finger’s width, caught her wrist, and stepped into her path.
When she slammed her shoulder toward his chest, he turned like a door swinging open and her own weight carried her past him, into open court on the wrong side.
He hadn’t hit her.
Not once.
That was the part that burned.
The pattern set itself.
She attacked; he caught, redirected, placed her somewhere useless, and released.
Dust grayed her knees and forearms while his uniform sat untouched on his shoulders.
Her breathing turned rough enough to hear.
His hadn’t changed.
Twice more he sent her stumbling back to the same stretch of stone, like the court had a spot reserved for her, and heat crawled up her face each time her boots found it.
“Again,” Dante said, and his eyes had gone bright, actually bright, like she was the best thing to happen to his week.
Raven swallowed the answer she wanted to give.
Then she swallowed the next one.
She stood there with the knife low, dragging air past her aching ribs, and made herself stop throwing attacks that had no spine to them.
At the court’s edge, the younger examiner had drifted forward from the wall, following her feet now instead of his sheet.
The bearded one held her assessment open against his chest.
Cassian hadn’t moved from the entrance, and his silence somehow reached across the whole court.
So she stopped trying to pass Dante and started studying him.
She went at his knife side, sharp and shallow.
Catch, turn, released — back where she started.
She let a dozen counts pass, then took the same line a shade slower and flatter.
Catch, turn, released.
The third time she changed the angle, dropping low off her good leg, and it made no difference to him at all.
The same wrist, the same rotation across her path, the same easy strength walking her backward.
But each time he turned her, he turned the same way.
Across his own body, right shoulder driving through — and for half a breath, every time, his left side swung open like a gate.
Her eyes went bright before she could school them.
She didn’t look at the gap again.
She looked at everything else — and let her feet do the remembering.
Once more she pressed the knife side, lighter, just enough to feel him answer, and there it was, the gate again, open and shut in half a breath.
By the entrance, Cassian’s gaze had dropped to her feet.
It moved from her feet to the shielded marker, then settled on Dante’s shoulders and stayed there.
When Raven touched the same side once more and Dante’s body repeated its turn exactly, Cassian’s brow drew together.
Raven committed.
She drove at Dante’s knife side a final time, full speed, and let his hand close around her wrist the way it had five times before.
The turn began.
And the instant his rotation took hold of her, she opened her fingers.
The knife dropped.
His pull met nothing to pull against.
Raven was already folding under his arm, spinning with his turn instead of against it, the blade falling between their boots where he’d have to give it a thought or give it up.
His left side swung open one more time and she went through the gate.
Dante was behind her.
Ahead, eight paces of empty stone, and the marker glowing inside its shield.
She ran.
Her ankle screamed and she took the pain and spent it, three steps, four, the marker close enough to see the grain of the bronze — she’d done it, she’d actually— Behind her, steel slapped into a palm.
He’d caught the knife before it landed.
Then his other arm came around her waist, and the court rotated.
There was no impact, no violence in it at all; he simply gathered her remaining speed the way he’d gathered all the rest, carried her through a long smooth arc, and set her down.
Her boots struck stone.
The same stretch of stone.
Her spot.
Dante stood in front of her, breathing easy, and held out the knife hilt-first.
Nothing in his face mocked her.
He looked pleased — genuinely, warmly pleased, like an instructor whose student had finally cleared a wall.
“That would’ve caught a lesser wolf,” he said.
Raven took the knife.
Her fingers closed until the hilt’s edge bit into her palm, and heat spread up her neck, across her face, worse than the stumbling, worse than the dust, worse than the laugh from the gallery an hour ago.
Her cleverest plan.
Her best thing.
He’d seen it forming, kept feeding her the opening on purpose, and waited — to see if she’d take it.
She didn’t answer him.
She didn’t look at his pleased face.
She looked past his shoulder at the marker.
“Little sand remains,” the Headmaster said.
The glass was almost empty.
Most of it lay heaped in the bottom bulb, and what was left ran thin.
No time to study him again, no time to build anything.
Dante strolled back into position and rolled his shoulders once, smiling like a man expecting a good final round.
Raven opened her hand and let the knife fall.
It rang off the stone and lay there.
The younger examiner’s head came up.
She was already moving.
She broke toward his fed side, the side he’d been serving her all trial, and his weight answered it, the familiar turn gathering — then she cut hard the other way, off the throbbing ankle, taking the throbbing pain straight up her leg without slowing, and threw everything she had left at the gap.
Dante moved instantly.
No lazy correction this time.
She slipped past his shoulder by a hair, lunging, arm at full stretch, fingers reaching — the shield-light close enough to warm them, two inches, one— His hand closed around her wrist.
She stopped.
All of her, at once, like hitting the end of a chain.
Raven pulled.
Her boots slid on the stone.
Something tore hot through her shoulder and her ribs seized, but her free hand came up anyway, reaching past their locked arms, fingers spread toward the bronze.
Dante’s smile faded.
She wasn’t testing him now.
She was reaching with her whole ruined body, willing to leave the shoulder wrecked and the ankle worse, and every line of her said she would tear herself open before she let him walk her back to that spot again.
He looked from her straining hand to her face, and the last of the amusement left his.
Their eyes locked, a hand’s width apart.
Hers furious.
His, finally, paying attention.
He didn’t let go.
She pulled harder.
And something buried answered at that moment.
It came up from behind her ribs the way it had in the Blackthorn kitchen, that cold pressure that had risen when the pans shook on their hooks — the presence that had gone silent through two rejections, through the road, through everything since.
Her heartbeat swelled until it was the only sound in the court.
The pain in her shoulder, her ribs, her ankle, all of it sank beneath something colder, and her silent wolf drove forward.
Dante was still holding her wrist when her irises began to turn.
Silver-white bled in from the edges, spreading, swallowing the color until almost nothing of her ordinary eyes remained.
His amber-gold gaze locked onto hers, and his eyes went wide at what they found there.
A soundless force burst out of Raven and rolled across the assessment court in a widening ring.
Dust raced away from her boots.
The boundary lines flared, and every court sigil the pressure touched burned white.