Penned in behind the man, Georgia is pelting him with pebbles she scoops from beneath the manicured hedge. “Why can’t there be any big, heavy rocks in this park?” she yells, throwing a handful of gravel at his back. He doesn’t even seem to notice, which makes her even more furious. As he lunges at Arthur, she rears up and kicks him from behind with her ankle boot’s stiletto heel, landing it right where his jacket hikes up from the back of his jeans.

He roars and swings backward with his sword, catching Georgia’s forearm. She yelps and grabs the wound with her hand. Blood drips from between her fingers, but the way she takes her cursing up a level suggests she’s not seriously hurt.

Arthur can’t see that, though, since Georgia’s directly behind the guy. He charges, his sword carving wide, powerful strokes. “Thou dare lay thy filthy hand upon my dearest?” he roars, switching back to the old French of his medieval days. But his anger causes him to make a fatal error. He sweeps low while his enemy’s arm is up, but in his fury, he raises his head to meet the man’s eyes, leaving his neck completely vulnerable. It’s a move I’ve made in my lessons with Gaspard, when I wasn’t paying enough attention. Each time it earned me a painful bruise on my neck along with Gaspard’s flippant comment, “You’re dead.”

But this isn’t Gaspard. And it isn’t a practice sword. It’s a numa-charged human, and the very real, very sharp sword catches Arthur on the side of his neck and slices inward. The blade lodges deep inside instead of slicing cleanly through, pulling the sword from its owner’s grasp.

What takes place next happens so quickly that if I wasn’t looking at just the right spot, I wouldn’t know how it happened.

Georgia stands there, horrified, watching Arthur fall.

Kate yells, “Georgia, catch!” and a flashing object spins through the air between the sisters.

Georgia raises her arm and catches the short-sword in one hand. And lunging forward in a practiced move, learned in what must be hundreds of hours of fencing lessons with Gaspard, she thrusts the sword into the man’s back. The blade emerges through his chest before Georgia pulls it back, letting him fall, lifeless, to the ground. Then, dropping the sword, she steps over the man and crouches next to Arthur’s body. She eases the blade from his neck and cups his practically-severed head in her hands and lets out a wail of despair.