Mina reached up with both hands then, palms out, and the effect of everything Seraphis had thrown recoiled like a spring and slamd back on itself. The rain cut into itself, the blades folding inward and collapsing.
Where Seraphis expected to see explosions and ruin, there was only a silence that wound tighter than any knot and left behind a bare, clean wound. Mina clapped: a small, perfunctory applause, the sound the sa as a dry leaf falling.
"You had such pretty ideas," she said, and her voice was calm enough that it made Seraphis want to strike her harder.
Seraphis pushed through the fog of exhaustion and the weight of the wound in her back. She felt the world leech away in windows — an absence here, a fold there — and she cursed without thinking.
The blade in her hand was heavy, stained, and humming with a red that looked like a lit throat.
She tried to press forward and plant a blow that would be, hopefully, aningful: a single cut across the bandages, a slash that would draw blood and show the bandaged woman that she bled like everyone else.
She struck. The bandage ripped a thin, neat line. For a blink there was red under the fabric. Then the red was not red anymore; it was a small, hollow place that refused to be looked at straight on, and when she blinked, the red was gone, and the bandages were whole. Her blade found the cloth, but could not find anything to cut. Her arms burned where the muscles emptied; she felt suddenly as if she had been trying to hold smoke in both hands.
Mina smiled then, small and satisfied, and stepped forward into the falling dark as if nothing extraordinary were happening. "You are noisy," she said. "Like a child trying to wake a sleeping city."
Seraphis's vision tunneled. Beneath the brass taste of blood in her mouth, there was a ringing that edged her hearing — an overlapping double that ant she had trained too long and too hard and had asked too much of herself.
She forced her knees to move and found that each movent now took a mile of will. She saw Clara on the ground a little way off, the knife in her hand gleaming in the red light.
Clara's throat had been pierced before; Seraphis had watched a drop climb and kill her once. Mina had laughed then; the scene had been sharp and final. And now Clara was getting up again, sohow, crawling, focusing on the blade. She wrenched the knife free and pushed herself up by sheer will. Her eyes were empty but bright, the look of a thing that had been told to be a blade.
Seraphis did not calculate. There was no ti to make a moral chart of whether the one who ran ant to kill and whether a quick defense would be killing. A mother is not slow to defend. A goddess with blood in her mouth is not slow. Her hand closed and the blade drove forward into Clara's chest.
It went in deep, true, and the world telescoped into a second where she felt the beat of another heart under her fingers.
Clara's face opened into a gasp that was only partly pain. She smiled at Seraphis with a line of teeth wet with red.
"The dragons are truly despicable," she whispered, clutching the robe of Seraphis with one shaking hand.
Clara's eyes glazed halfway over, and she sagged. She did not die cleanly, but she folded into Seraphis's arms like sothing that had given up on being solid. For a long, terrible beat, Seraphis held her, knuckles white, blade slick and warm in the other hand.
She saw a gaping hole in Clara's throat, which was not caused by Seraphis; this one was old, and the wound still had not healed. There were signs of slight decay.
She thought she heard a na in the gurgling voice — a na that might have been Selena. It was impossible to be sure. A mother's mind will conjure any image to fit a wound. Seraphis let herself see the child she had lost pressed to her breast for a second, a hazy, impossible hope that fit into the gash Clara had made like a counterfeit coin into a casket.
"You killed her," Mina said softly, clapping like an audience that had been denied the climax until now. "This one's na is Elara, a fragile little princess stabbed in the throat by dragons when they sought to conquer the continent."
Her voice did not mock so much as feed on the calculation. "You did not rely stab a blade; you finished sothing off because you wanted peace from the noise. How very Draconic."
Seraphis felt the gravity of the words and the absurdity that she had believed otherwise. She had not gone hunting for murderers in that instant. She had gone for defense. She had gone for the space around herself like any living thing would when life presses close. But sothing in the way Clara's smile had held — an almost pleased acceptance — seared her into a hollow even when blood cooled beneath her palm.
"How very boring," Mina made a small, lazy sound and then extended a hand. The rain of blood that had been the sky unraveled at the gesture and withdrew as if soone had snatched a curtain closed.
The blood moon winked out like a candle being pinched between two thumbs. The red sky reversed itself, and the air cleared; the trees righted themselves as if they had been straightened back up from an odd nap. The change was as complete as a door shutting. The clearing slled of charred leaves and old iron, but the imdiate sll of wet blood receded like a tide.
Seraphis fell to her knees like a marionette whose strings had been cut. The world materially collapsed into its flaws: sounds returned with jagged edges, leaves resud their small talk, and the rain in the folds of her cloak hit the earth with regular taps. Mina watched her with an expression that was almost affectionate in its mildness.
Then it happened: the backlash.
For one ragged second, Seraphis felt the world inside her reverse. It was as if everything that had been poured out through her had never traveled away but had been turned back and shoved inward. Blood that had been running inside her veins could not travel through the paths clogged by ether; it folded and found new exits.
It pushed, insistent and cruel, through places that were not ant for streams. She felt it co through her teeth; warm, wet, and tallic. She felt it through her nostrils, thick and hot. Her lips parted, and red welled out of them. Blood pooled in her mouth, and she swallowed it against so reflex, and then it rose and forced its way out in a spray that stung like iron.
Her eyes watered with it. She felt a cold pressure at the base of her skull and then the taste of bitterness in her ears. It filled her ears, and when she clapped both hands over them, so of it still trickled from her ears. It pushed through her nose and through the small holes of wounds around her face and hair. It ca out of her mouth again in a bitter gush and from her skin in small beadings and through the tiny pores on her body.
She could feel the liquid crawling through every inch of her skin, a relentless tide. Her knees dug into the earth. She tasted it everywhere — iron thick on her tongue; the world was reduced to heat, to chy, and to the small, animal panic of a heart that still thinks it can outrun a sentence.
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