For the next several hours, steel rang against steel as Ashlynn attacked again and again. Thane held nothing back, countering viciously with precise deflections and counterstrokes. Each time he slipped past her guard, fresh welts bloomed across her arms and shoulders. Underneath the quilted fabric of her gambeson, purple bruises swelled and throbbed until she drew emerald energy from the fallen trees to seal split skin and mend torn muscle.
By the second hour, blood had dried in her hair from three separate scalp wounds. By the third, her right wrist had been sprained twice when Thane mercilessly knocked her blade from her hands. The breaks Ashlynn needed for healing grew longer and longer as her reserves depleted, until she knelt gasping among the fallen leaves, one hand pressed to ribs that Thane had cracked using the pommel of her own blade after wresting it from her hands.
