One of the demon twins

The demon twins

At the Ferian Gap, while the Ironteeth are being taught to ride wyverns for Adarlan, Faline and her twin Fallon run knife drills across three covens using lower-ranked witches as the targets. Living ones. Manon watches them do it and the word that comes to her is glee. Nothing in the books walks that back or softens it, and neither of them is sorry, and that is simply who the demon twins are before any of the rest of it happens to them.

Three unprotected blows

She and Fallon brawl with a pack of Yellowlegs at the Omega, and Manon disciplines them both with three blows each, unprotected — no blocking, no turning away. This is the coven's real arithmetic. The two most violent witches in the Thirteen take their punishment from their Wing Leader standing perfectly still, and then go back to work. It is not fear that keeps them there. Any of them could have left at any point across a hundred years, and not one of them ever did.

No gold in her eyes

Gold flecks in a Blackbeak's eyes are the most prized trait the clan has, and they are not decorative — they are the whole of what stands between a witch and the Valg. Faline has none. So at Morath the witch who used her own inferiors as target practice ends up on her hands and knees, vomiting, with nothing to fight and nothing to do about it. The Valg are entirely uninterested in how frightening anybody is. That is more or less the point of them.

Laughing

At Orynth the Thirteen ground Manon so she cannot follow them, then fly at the last witch tower — the one that levels the castle if it is still standing in an hour. A Yielding takes a witch's whole life out through her at once and there is no version in which she survives it. Faline and Fallon go together, and they go down laughing. Not defiant, exactly. Not brave, exactly. Laughing, which is a worse thing to read and exactly the right thing for them.