Harter Hammerfeld laughed like a man who'd been waiting his whole life to laugh like that.
And the wind answered him. The green-white current tore through the broken wall of the pass and rewrote the air inside it, and at the heart of that howling sat one flying sword, thin and bright as a splinter of mirror glass, spinning so fast it threw light in every direction at once.
White Feather moved around it like she had been born knowing exactly where it would be.
She did not block, match or meet it in any way. Instead she tilted and turned. Her blazing sword came up not to stop the flying blade but to redirect it — a glancing angle, the flat of her steel kissing the flat of its edge, and the flying blade sang off the contact and curved into the stone wall and screamed back into play without slowing. She was already somewhere else. Every move she made was the same move: don't be where it wants you to be.
She made it look like water.
