And now we get to wonder if Xander will kill Violet on the sparring mat. Because there’s totally going to be a chance that might happen. I mean, we all know how dangerous the man is. We’ve been told over and over again, right?

Violet starts the sparring match by flinging a dagger right at his chest, because this fucking school. Of course, since she aimed for a kill shot instead of something else, naturally he deflects it. She’s only allowed to attempt a kill when it won’t work.

Xaden…actually spars. Whenever she comes at him with a knife, he takes it from her and knocks it out of the arena but otherwise juts engages in what we in the real world would recognize as sparring. No injuries, mostly holds and throws and defensive moves, that’s it. Oooo, such danger, much fear. Violet, of course, gets outrageously furious over it all.

“Taking out your enemy before the battle is really smart; I’ll give you that,” […]

Oh gods. He knows what I’ve been doing.

…wait, did you think you were being sneaky? Because when every single opponent comes up sick conveniently right before your match, I’m pretty sure the whole school knows. But also they let people kill each other so I figured they were just letting her get away with it.

He points out she’ll never get better that way, and I would agree with an abled student but it feels like a real shit thing to say to a disabled one. More ‘grit and bear it’ bullshit, more ‘fight through the pain.’ Feels like her finding ways to win around her disability should be the more upheld story beat, rather than Xaden’s view, which ends up being what she does because there is no more poison after this. Ugh.

They tussle some more until he pins her to the ground in That One Sexy Fighting Pose and she gets all atwitter about it. Meh, it’s a romance book from a romance author, I’d be disappointed if that didn’t happen. He actually gives her some advice about fighting as a smaller person against bigger opponents and then just leaves.

Because, you know, he’s the big scary dangerous enemy and all that.

“I’m surprised he let you live,” Dain says later that night

Oh give up already, this is so tedious!

They’re in his room after hours and spend some time talking about Xaden, then talking about dragons, and then Dain says he’s got a way out for her. He talked to the head of the scribe school and Markham agreed to take her in and hide her until it’s too late for her mom to do anything about it.

Literally her one reason for why she’s here in the first place, and he found a way around it.

So naturally Violet gets mad about it.

Dain knows me better than anyone and if he still thinks I can’t do this after I’ve made it this far…

Violet, you don’t think you can do this. We’ve had nothing out of her except endless complaints about how she’s going to die, about how everyone wants her dead, about how she’s small and weak, but the minute Dain acts on that belief he’s the bad guy.

Dain begs her to at least think about it, because while they both apparently think she’s in serious danger only Dain wants to do jack shit about it.

The next day, Violet and the others in her squad go to a vertical obstacle course called the Gauntlet. They’ll have to get all the way up it before they can go meet the dragons, and they’re allowed to have a small handful of practice runs before doing it for real. Have you seen American Ninja Warrior? It’s just that.

No, literally, just that. Every obstacle described in this book is something I’ve seen on the game show. Including the final task being to run up a really tall curved wall. (ANW calls it the Warped Wall.) It’s made even more obvious by some of the obstacles spinning, which is done by…idk, magic? Athletes in ANW will go through grueling regimens to be able to do the course and a lot of them have custom built obstacles at home that they can practice on.

Meanwhile the military school doesn’t even do a daily physical training and they only let the students tackle the course like 9 times all at once. Fucking boggling.

Actual training follows a crawl-walk-run progression, where you practice doing a thing in a small, slow, safe condition with assistance and gradually work your way up to doing it faster and more complicated. This school is like “Nope, let’s just chuck you straight at the wall. Good luck.”

As the squad banters, we get a character named Tynan being particularly mean to Violet and we find out he also wants her dead because…Jack said so. No really, that’s the reason.

There’s lots of descriptions of the kids running the course which are interesting to read but boring to summarize. They do more or less fine. Then it’s Violet’s turn. She starts rambling off facts about dragons to keep calm, like on the Death Bridge. We learn of the existence of feathertails for the first time, because going back and putting that in the dragon class we’ve already seen…wouldn’t work? Somehow? Feathertails are either a separate breed of dragon or very young dragons who don’t have a weapon tail yet, the book is unclear.

Violet gets through most of the obstacle course fine, because that’s how it goes when you have weak joints and need to jump around and lot and endure unusual sorts of twisting and torsion. EDS doesn’t hit everyone the same and plenty of people are able to do more than others with EDS, but when you have this in your book and yet the only things that injure the main character are things that would injure literally anyone? It’s weird. Instead, her one and only and single problem with the course is that she’s too short to complete the last two obstacles.

A dragon flies by overhead, distracts all the kids, and one of them falls off the course and dies. That woman could have been the bravest, strongest, bestest dragon rider ever but this school will never know because they’d rather just kill people willy nilly if they don’t show up to a school already perfect.

Later that day, Violet takes the dead woman’s possessions to the roof to be burned. It’s part of their tradition to burn personal effects, and the family members didn’t want to come to the school to do it so Violet volunteered. While up on the roof, she thinks about death and whether or not she should leave.

My entire being rebels against [going to the Scribe Quadrant], which makes me question everything as I stand here, letting minutes tick by before the bells sound for curfew. I climb back down the stairs without a solid answer as to why.

We never get one. She never has an answer. We start the book with Violet’s main personality trait being that she likes books, likes the library, wants to be a Scribe, etc. Since then she’s mostly thought about how much it sucks to be there. She’s not getting anything out of being there and she’s not even feeling any satisfaction out of her successes. She just thinks about how Xaden is dangerous and how she’s weak and that’s it. And yet when given an out, she doesn’t take it, and all we get is that her ‘entire being rebels’ against the idea.

This sucks. It’s horrible character building. It’s basically admitting the need for a rewrite and then not doing it. And, the worst sin of all, it’s boring.

The closest you could come to a reason for Violet staying is ‘stubbornness,’ which she is that. But I still don’t like it. She’s not stubborn enough to follow her original dream; why doesn’t that count?

On her way back inside she notices three dragons returning from a trip, and it’s Xaden and two other marked guys. Xaden knows she’s there because shadows, and he sends the other two ahead so he can talk to Violet in private.

They banter, she asks if he’s going to kill her, I rant about how he hasn’t shown any inclination so far while he gives a noncommittal answer. Violet rails about how much the school sucks and she doesn’t want to be there. SO LEAVE.

Xaden gives her some cryptic advice about how she can get up the Gauntlet if she just stops following expectations.