The woman stepped closer to Bulkezu—that fast he rolled to one side and jerked himself up and back around in a half turn. The tips of his deadly wings hissed through the air to slice her across the abdomen and through her sheath of necklaces. Beads of jade and turquoise, pellets of gold, rained onto the ground around her. He leaped backward, up to his feet, sword held before him. His helmet he slapped down, and again when it would not settle right around his eyes, and then, with an angry grunt, he wrenched it off and flung it to one side so that, finally, his face was exposed—proud and handsome in the Quman way.
Ugly red welts bloomed on the woman’s bronze-dark skin. Blood welled from the cuts and snaked down in vermilion beads to lodge in the waistband of her skirt.
They faced off, each wounded, each warrior now. In this way they measured each the other: the Quman warrior made fearsome by the glint of the griffin feathers bound into the wings at his back—only a man who had killed a griffin could wear such wings; and the foreign woman, not of human breed or birthing, with her bronze cast of skin and hair, her own blood seeping unheeded down her belly. Her gaze on her opponent was as unyielding as the stone behind Zacharias’ back.
Bulkezu sprang forward, batting at the spear with his sword and closing the distance between them. Zacharias gasped aloud. But her spear circled around Bulkezu’s blow, and as she stepped aside, she caught him with the haft, a strike behind his knee. She was neither frail nor slender; the force of her blow dropped him to his knees, but he sat down hard, locking the haft beneath him, and lashed out with his sword. She leaped back, abandoning the spear. But as he rose to pursue her, the spear moved. Like a serpent come to life, it twined around his legs. He fell, catching himself on his hands, but where his sword struck earth, it sank into the dirt as if hidden claws dragged it down into the depths. No matter how hard he scrabbled, he could not grab it.
She raised her arms again, chest naked now except for a single strand of gold that curved along the swell of a breast. The shaking resumed, more violent than before. The great lintel stones rocked and teetered and began to slide. Wind battered Zacharias to his knees. With his dagger Bulkezu hacked at the magicked spear wound around his legs, but to no avail. With each cut it merely grew spurs and flourishes, and these spurs sprouted roots that embedded themselves into the ground until its many-limbed net pinned his calves to the dirt and twined up his arms. In frustration he threw his dagger at her. With her arms outstretched and blood trickling down her breasts to pool in the folds of her skirt, she merely stared.