The enemy earthcrafter following in the wake of the first suddenly stumbled out of the earth five feet from Tavi, abruptly finding himself standing in the open air at the bottom of the pit. Tavi stared at him for a motionless instant of recognition. He hadn’t seen the massively muscled, lank-haired man who had appeared, a thug named Renzo, since commencement activities at the Academy. The enormous young man was perhaps a year older than Tavi and weighed two of him. An extremely accomplished earthcrafter, Renzo had been stupid enough to be a friend of Kalarus Brencis Minoris, which doubtless explained the steel slaver’s collar about his mountainous neck. Tavi had beaten Renzo into screaming surrender before he’d had use of any furycrafting at all, and the act still shamed him in his memory.

The instant of hesitation gave Renzo a chance to react. He flicked a hand, and the earth surged up around Tavi, as if to bury him alive.

Tavi recovered his balance and immediately drew strength from the earth—specifically, from the earth trying to smother him, weakening the furies responding to Renzo’s command. He waded forward, through the failing power of those furies, and, with an instant of razor-sharp focus, cut cleanly through Renzo’s hastily raised blade, the steel collar about the huge man’s neck—and the neck beneath it. Renzo’s body dropped like a slaughtered hog’s, still quivering.

Time slowed.

There was little blood. The blazing sword in Tavi’s hand had cauterized the cuts even as he made them. The courtyard bully’s broad hands twitched and spasmed. His head had fallen facedown, and Tavi could see his mouth moving for a few seconds, as if to spit out the dirt upon his tongue. That didn’t last long. A heartbeat, two, then there was stillness.

Renzo had been an appallingly petty evil from the last days of Tavi’s childhood.

Tavi felt sick at how easy it had been to murder him.

His thoughts and focus were, for a few seconds, entirely shattered, and so, when the vord Queen exploded from the earth behind Renzo’s corpse, she nearly killed him in the first instant of their meeting.

Tavi seized upon a windcrafting, weak though it was down in the sinkhole, to speed his perceptions. Even with the crafting, there was time for no more than a bizarre, flash impression of a beautiful face, glittering black eyes, a tattered old dress—and then there was a flicker of motion as a shadowy blade darted toward his heart.