The girl's pulse hammered against Maxwell's palm.
She was still fighting. Her script was crawling up his gauntlet in tight black curls, hunting for a rule it could rewrite, and her free hand was clawing at his wrist. But her face had gone dark red, and her eyes were losing focus, and a little more pressure would end it.
Across the frost, the princess of Mount Hua had not moved.
"Let her go," she said.
"You came here to talk about fairness, I think," Maxwell said. "Three against one. A dragon on my back. Let's discuss it."
"This was never about fairness." Her voice was very quiet and completely level. "It's about consequences. You fired on a city full of people who came to listen to the wind. You aimed at a hotel with a child in it." The plum blossoms still hanging in the air around her turned, all at once, to face him. "These are the consequences."
The blossoms he'd broken were gone. The ones that remained had been listening too.
Cold closed around his left wrist.
