" Cheeks reddening, Mia peered at the first boy.

“Your name is Shivs? O, because you carry knives, aye?” She glanced at the younger boy. “You’d be Fleas then?” To the girl. “Let me guess, Worms?”1

“Clever,” said the blonde. And stepping lightly to Mia’s side, she drew back a fist and buried it in Mia’s stomach.

The breath left her lungs with a wet cough as she fell to her knees. Blinking and blinded, Mia clutched her belly, trying not to retch. Astonishment inside her. Astonishment and rage.

Nobody had hit her before.

Nobody haddared.

She’d seen her mother fence wits countless times in the Spine. She’d seen men reduced to stuttering and women driven to tears. And Mia had studied well. But the rules said the aggrieved was supposed to riposte with some barb of their own, not haul off and punch her like some lowborn thug in an alley scra—

“O …,” Mia wheezed. “Right. "

― Jay Kristoff , Nevernight (The Nevernight Chronicle, #1)