Kori didn’t lower her knives.
The blue glow at the cores was still rising, the frost beneath her boots was still spreading outward in jagged ridges, and her Chasmis was still open beneath the curtain of her hair. The fight had not ended; she was halfway through committing to the next exchange – a huge Eon attack that would shatter all the ice around, and send all shards towards Lay at once, from every direction. And then the woman across from her, who had a moment ago dropped into a deeper stance with both Damascus blades pointed at Kori’s eyes, had asked for a frozen drink.
"...Pardon?"
"Slushie." Lay tilted her head. Her smile was casual again, the brief flash of real focus from a few seconds ago folded back into her default mood. "It’s a drink. Something like shaved ice, flavoured. Sweet. You scoop it with a spoon... Not familiar?"
Kori stared.
The woman was too stunned to speak.
"You don’t know what a slushie is?" Lay’s eyebrows rose a fraction beneath the hood. "Really? They have them in Kelperion. Big stands of them. There’s a woman in the upper market square who does a mango one that’s actually criminal. I went there once. Almost got recognised, from there! Can you believe that?"
"...You’re asking me," Kori said slowly, "for a slushie. Right now."
"Yes."
"In the middle of -" Kori gestured with one knife at the rooftop between them, the scattered cuts on both their bodies, the frost, the few drops of blood and the unfinished fight. "...This."
"Look." Lay’s shoulders rose and fell. "Sometimes you’re doing a thing and then a thought walks into your head and you think - slushie. And the slushie thought stays. You know? You know that thing where you really want a slushie and you can’t stop thinking about it? I’ve been thinking about it for like ten minutes now. And I figured, since you’re already running this whole ice setup -" she gestured vaguely at the spreading frost, "- it would be silly not to ask."
Kori’s expression did not change. Beneath the surface, several layers of her mind were running parallel processes that all concluded the same thing: she did not have an answer for this kind of conversation. The Phalanx training did not cover it. The Chasmis did not parse it. Lay was a woman who had walked through her ice like weather, mocked her name, scored a few cuts on her body in the last two minutes, and was now standing on a rooftop in the middle of a city-wide manhunt, asking her opponent to make her a snack.
"What’s with the slushie all of a sudden," Kori said.
"I told you. Craving."
"You’re being chased by every Warden in the city."
"Yeah."
"And you want a slushie."
"Yes."
"...You do know you need juice for a slushie. Or syrup. Something flavoured."
"Oh!" Lay’s face brightened.
She sheathed both blades in a single fluid motion, the curved Damascus disappearing into the harnesses at her back, and her hand dropped to the inside of her cloak. She came up with a battered brass canteen, slightly dented near the base, the leather strap around its neck worn smooth with use. She held it out toward Kori with both hands, the gesture almost ceremonial, like a child presenting a found object to a parent.
"Hibiscus tea."
The smell reached Kori on the next breath of cold air, even though the canteen was closed: Floral. Slightly sweet. Genuine - tea someone brewed in a kettle rather than something pre-prepared from a bottle. Lay had been carrying this canteen all night. Through the leap, the rooftop fight, the hammer-throw chain, the blade exchanges. The canteen had been on her hip through everything. She was about to question it, but Lay spoke again first.
"I always carry it with me," Lay explained. "It’s pretty nice in the cold. And I figured, since you’re doing all the pretty ice thing anyway, we could make this work."
"And then what?"
"And then we go back to our friendly little sparring. I’m already running late... Eh, I don’t even care anymore. Just one drink first... Promise."
Kori weighed it.
Across the frost between them, Lay stood with both her hands and the canteen still extended, her cloak settled around her shoulders, her bandage-bound torso visible where the cut had opened the fabric. The wound on her side had already stopped bleeding. The blood on Kori’s own shoulder had not. The Wardens were still combing the lower streets. The petals were still closed. Lay had ignored every opportunity to escape – even though she had plenty. She had stayed on the roof, she had drawn Kori into an exchange of blades and walked out of it asking for a snack.
This was not the behaviour of a person trying to escape. This was the behaviour of a person who had decided the fight was the most entertaining thing she had access to tonight and was extending it through whatever weird mechanism kept her amused.
Kori let her stance soften by a degree, just a tiny degree.
"On one condition," she said.
"Mm?"
"You answer my questions. After."
"How many questions?"
"As many as I want."
Lay considered this for a moment. The lazy smile crept back across her mouth, broader than before, suggesting she was already enjoying the questions Kori hadn’t asked yet.
"Deal."
"Sit down. Stay where you are. Don’t move while I work."
"Yes, ma’am."
Lay dropped to the rooftop in one motion, folded her legs beneath her, and with the patient posture of a child waiting for a meal. Her hood pushed back slightly with the movement. Some of her dark hair fell free across her shoulder as the hood fell, too. She still had both her hands extended forward towards Kori, holding the canteen like it was the most precious thing.
Kori slowly took the canteen. She didn’t sense any kind of poison or other dirty tricks.
She walked five steps away from Lay - enough distance to do the work, close enough to keep her in peripheral vision. Then she gathered her hands holding both knives together at chest height, and from the air between her palms, a block of ice started forming out of seemingly nothing. It grew slowly, as snowflakes and tiny ice particles around Kori started condensing into the ice. It became the size of her own head, the cold pulling moisture from the rooftop’s atmosphere into a single dense crystalline mass.
What happened next was the closest thing the Phalanx had to a parlour trick. Both blades flickered through the air in front of her at a speed that would have looked, to an untrained observer, like the knives had multiplied tenfold. The ice block remained suspended where Kori had formed it; her blades passed through it in hundreds of fast, controlled cuts, each one slicing the crystal into smaller and smaller fragments, the ice reducing from a block to chips to shavings to something approaching snow. The work took maybe four seconds. By the end of it the ice was hanging in the air in a fine, soft mass of shaved crystal that drifted gently downward in the cold.
Lay let out a small whistle.
"Damn! And you couldn’t pull that speed against me?"
Kori didn’t look at her. "I didn’t need to kill you."
"Ohh, so that’s why you were fighting like a soggy straw! You were trying to immobilize me, right?"
Kori answered with an uninterested groan.
Lay exhaled, ammused. "Well, miss Phalanx, let me tell you, if you want to immobilize someone you either outpower, outsmart and outspeed them..."
"Or you ask for backup" Kori answered.
Lay stared at her for a few seconds. "Uh... Yeah, maybe, that works... But you should know better than anyone that there are times where your "backup" is either not available or dead."
"I guess I’ll just have to outpower, outsmart and outspeed them then."
Lay started laughing, a small giggle deep in her chest. "Oh, dear... If you have an ego that size, you’re beyond saving."
She lightly slapped her forehead in a gesture that looked like disappointment. "My take is – and hear me out – If you want to immobilize someone, you beat the living soul out of them until they can’t move"
Kori brushed the snow in front of her, making sure it was the right texture. "Whatever you say. But enough talking, you’re the one answering my questions after this."
"Yeah, yeah. Whatever pays your bills."
Kori opened the canteen.
The hibiscus tea fully hit her on the next breath - sharper now, the brass almost amplifying the floral note, the sweetness rising into the cold air with a bit of warmth still locked inside the metal. Lay had brewed this herself, and the canteen was clearly hers in the way old tools clearly carry someone’s identity, carried so long that the wear pattern matched the hand that held it. Kori’s fingers found the leather strap, and turned the canteen over.
She turned away from the floating snow, now facing Lay, and raised the canteen above her head.
The tea poured out in a long, steady stream - falling toward the rooftop in a thin red ribbon, the entire contents of the canteen about to spill across the ice and run away into the cracks of the city.