Marek Sill had four years on the copper drum plus a guild banner Ivory had not withdrawn. He came onto the upper floor at the tenth hour with the opening salute of a form built in an east district hall.
Jia had known it was coming since the day the draw was published on the hall board. She had said so at the workshop bench twice, in the flat register she keeps for terms, and everybody had believed her.
Knowing a thing is coming does not do very much when the salute is four positions your mother taught you at nine years old.
She opened badly, in a way nobody who had watched her fight for a year would have predicted. She went at Sill on the first exchange with everything she owned, which is not how she fights anybody.
He held her off for two full minutes without any visible difficulty at all. A patented form carries a defensive ladder, and a woman attacking that ladder in a straight line is using her own inheritance against herself.
