#alaurent

All that broidered shearling—fanciful stuff, birds and beasts of the hunt picked out in shining thread—billows as the fencer whirls. A flurry blows back the cowl. Silvering hair and snowflakes whip round the Ward of Gorion’s monstrous muzzle of a face: ruddy with cold, creased with vicious lines, smiling at her with beleaguered delight. “Why, Counsellor—”

Wyll’s foil bends against his foe’s forearm. His eyes flash with something of his father’s triumphant spark: Ulder Ravengard writ small, though the boy’s sprung up half a hand since Florrick saw him last. She almost smiles. His shoulders must exasperate his tailor. “Touché, your Grace!”

“Maimed, am I?” The old creature ducks out of reach with unnatural ease, nimble as the boy, and obligingly tucks the arm behind their back. Their foil flicks up and down like a music-master’s wand, turning Wyll’s aside. “Fortissimo, bravissimo—my goodness, young Ravengard, what do you call that one?”

Wyll, skidding with a shout of laughter in some slush, turns the mishap into a thrust. “The Legend’s Strike—”

The Duke catches him by the scruff before he falls. Florrick, with dignity, snorts and sidesteps them. All play, no work. “Puppies, the pair of you.”

The breathless grins they exchange tell her all. When the Duke slings Wyll at her, she raises her eyebrows and trips the boy into a snowbank. Her staff knocks aside a lunge of the Duke’s that shudders from the magewood to her bones, and then she’s dancing with a demon in Ravengard’s yard: clack-clack, clack-clack, the flashing foil bludgeoning the stick. She’s never parried so fast in her life. The Duke moves in ways that, for anyone else’s get, would not be possible—as though their blade is alive and after her, darting where she most fears for it to go, and only their indulgent grasp of the hilt dissuades it from running her through.

They’ve still got their damned arm behind their back. Florrick grits her teeth, shaken, sweating in her furs—

“My goodness,” gasps the Bhaalspawn, putting up the beastly foil. Sweat’s plastered a shock of their hair to their face. “Enough of that. With you about, Florrick”—with a wheezy laugh, they steady themself on Wyll’s shoulder—“why do we spend money on the Fists?”

* * *

“Perhaps,” says Ulder Ravengard with supreme tact, reaching across his writing-table for the carafe, “you would like a cup of chocolate?”

He’s never seen Florrick out of breath. If her chambers burned down around her, he doubts she would lose her composure enough to cough. She looks at him now like one of the wild-eyed haggards that perch on patriars’ wrists.