THE WIZARD AND THE SYLPH
Chapter Twenty-five
The Waiting Game
Dorain stood motionless in the small courtyard, sword upraised, eyes closed in concentration, her breathing slow, controlled, regular. Like the bare trees sketched in bleak, wintry shapes above and sharply etched shadows below, her stationary figure stood clearly defined against the pale blue sky and upon the cracked and broken skin of iced that rheumed the flagged ground. The only movement, the only sign of life, was the tenuous vapour that escaped her nostrils and lips.
Abruptly, she burst into complex motion, thrusting, parrying, spinning, tumbling, parrying, whirling, a blur-
And then, as abruptly, she stopped.
`Observe the enemy', she thought. Find the weak spot. Attack. Regroup. And again'. In her mind's eye she created attackers, fixed their positions, indentified their weaknesses. Then, in a blur of activity, she enacted the scene, a lithe, lethal dancer of death-
She was distracted by eyes. An ugly, indescribeable knot twisted the pit of her belly as she registered who it was.
"How long have you been watching me?" she asked Brogan diffidently, sheathing her sword.
"At the risk of sounding glib," he told her, "since our very first encounter."
Gathering her outer garments, which she had discarded before beginning her exercise, she donned them and watched Brogan askance as he approached her. "If you have come to converse," she said tersely, "this is not a good time. We must prepare ourselves while we can."