Seyun rubbed the breath flow back into his freed wrists as he ducked behind the six-foot granite stele. He assessed the courtyard with a mason’s eye rather than a duelist’s. He was a Coal fighter among Late Flame and seasoned early-Flame killers. If he stepped into the open center lane and tried to trade blows with a hooked broadsword using his bare forearms, he would be cut down in three breaths and force Ilyra to die defending a corpse.
Instead, while Ilyra held the eight-foot flat stone slab gap between the stele and the eastern wall with long, whistling spear thrusts that punished any man who tried to rush the reliquary slab head-on, Seyun looked down at the mortar lines along the western side of the enclosure.
Earlier that morning, while waiting at the gate for Ilyra to stop straining against the ward, he had noticed how winter frost-heave and the roots of the old rowan trees outside the wall had lifted three long paving slabs along the western drainage gutter. Beneath those tilted slabs ran an ancient stone-lined runoff trench two feet deep, its mortar eaten hollow by two hundred years of acidic leaf-mold.
Seeing that Ilyra’s spear made the central lane impassable, the masked leader barked a short, hand-signaled order. Right away, the two broadsword fighters who had recovered by the gate split off to their right, running abreast along the raised western paving slabs to come at Ilyra’s bleeding left shoulder from both angles at once.
Ilyra saw them coming out of the corner of her eye. But the masked leader was already pressing her center with heavy, two-handed cleaver strokes that sent showers of wet sparks off her spear collar. If she pivoted left to meet the two flankers, the leader’s Late Flame edge would take her in the ribs. If she held the center, the two hooked blades would trap her shaft from the side.
“One pace right on the second beat, White Heron—don’t look at the western wall!” Seyun called from behind the stele.
As the two flanking swordsmen reached the middle of the frost-heaved western slabs. It ran hard with their weight committed to their forward toes, Seyun stepped out from the shadow of the monument in the low, ground-hugging glide of the second base form. He didn’t strike at their blades. Seyun reached the end of the middle flat stone slab half a beat before the lead runner’s boot came down. He dropped his whole body weight through his right heel onto the cantilevered corner of the hollow slab.
Rotted lime mortar gave way underneath with a wet crunch. The four-hundred-pound granite slab tipped thirty degrees into the hidden drainage trench like a sprung trapdoor.
Both masked swordsmen stepped straight into the drop at full sprint. The lead fighter’s right ankle twisted sideways between the tipping stone edges with a heard snap, pitching him forward onto his knees. Meanwhile, the second man collided with his partner’s back and lost his hooked broadsword against the wall.
On the exact second beat Seyun had called, Ilyra shifted one clean pace to her right without taking her eyes off the leader’s cleaver. And without looking down, drove a single side-angled spear thrust past the edge of the stele into the trench. Her marsh-iron point took the first fallen swordsman cleanly through the meat of his right collarbone, pinning his sword-arm uselessly against the wet gravel.
The second man in the trench scrambled up with a dagger in his left fist, lunging at Seyun’s knees before the spear could withdraw. Seyun didn’t retreat. Turning eleven degrees on his rear heel in the seventh base form, Turning the Mill-Spout, he caught the man’s leather-wrapped wrist on the stacked bone of his own forearm, added a tiny pulse of internal Coal strength to the man’s forward driving force. Then he guided the attacker’s knuckles and temple straight into the square granite corner of Warden Maro’s stone stand.
The man slumped unconscious into the flooded gutter. Across the stele, Ilyra drew her spear back to guard against the leader, her chest heaving in the freezing mist. Neither she nor Seyun wasted breath on a word of praise. Every second of their survival in the cramped yard depended on Seyun trusting her seven-foot steel not to take his head off on the backswing, and Ilyra trusting his calls about stones she couldn’t spare an eye to check.
Between the moment when the western paving slab tipped into the hollow drainage trench and the moment when the second flanker lunged up with his left-hand dagger, Seyun’s breathing never broke its twelve-count Coal settlement. In the lower practice yard at Ash Reed, new students who sparred against faster opponents always held their breath in their upper chests. That turned their shoulders into rigid wooden blocks that telegraphed every dodge.
Seyun had spent eleven winters unable to project a single spark of Flame. Because of that, he had learned to treat an opponent’s incoming wrist the way a water gate tender treated a floating log in a spring spate. You never stood in front of the log to stop its weight. You touched its trailing end two inches to the side and let the river’s own current drive its nose into the stone pier.
When the dagger fighter’s temple struck the square granite corner of Warden Maro’s stone stand and the man collapsed into the gutter, Seyun didn’t pause to watch him fall. With the toe of his right boot, he hooked the fallen man’s short hooked broadsword out of the mud and kicked it clattering behind the reliquary niche where none of the leftover attackers could snatch it up.
Two paces to his right, Ilyra was trading rapid, ringing exchanges with the masked leader across the narrow central lane. Every time her seven-foot ash shaft flashed out, a ribbon of white steam hissed off the wet wood. Every time the leader beat her point aside with his heavy Late Flame cleaver, orange sparks sprayed across the puddles and the impact jarred her wounded left shoulder.
“The third flat stone slab ahead of your right toe is cracked across the middle, White Heron!” Seyun called from the low crouch of the fifth foundation shift as he circled the stele to keep the crossbowman by the wall from getting a clear line at her back. “Keep your front heel on the blue granite border—if you step on the gray slate to its left, the mud underneath will slide four inches toward the ditch!”
Ilyra’s right boot arrested its forward slide a hair’s breadth short of the gray slate he had named, planting solidly on the rough blue granite rim as she blocked a vicious slanted slash that would have caught her off-balance on a slipping stone. Through the din of steel and sleet, she gave a single, sharp nod of acknowledgment—already adjusting her footwork to use his eyes as her ground-map.
By the eastern wall, the crossbowman finished spanning his steel bow-prod with a clawed belt-hook, slapped a heavy quarrel into the groove, and aimed not at Ilyra’s moving spear. But at Seyun’s chest as the Coal student pivoted past the corner of the altar. Calling the ground for a spearwoman had made the unbadged clerk the more dangerous target of the two.
Seyun saw the bowman’s right shoulder drop a quarter-second before the trigger-lever clicked. Instead of diving flat into the mud where a follow-up blade could pin him, Seyun carried out the ninth foundation shift, Reed Folding Under Wind. He dropped his hip six inches while rotating his torso sideways so his oilskin bundle cleared the granite stele by a finger’s breadth. The quarrel snapped three wet fibers off his reed sleeping mat and shattered against the back wall of the shrine porch.
Before the bowman could hook his string a third time, Ilyra lunged full-length across the center puddle and drove her spear tip through the stock of the crossbow itself, splintering the seasoned walnut lath in the man’s hands and forcing him to draw his short iron crow-bill.
“That leaves the threshold clear on the east!” Ilyra breathed, drawing her shaft back across her hip while blood dripped steadily from her left fingers onto the stone. “When the big one commits to the porch step, take the satchel behind the western pillar!”
“Don’t meet his next overhead stroke with a flat bar!” Seyun warned her, seeing the masked leader plant both boots on the dry lower step of the porch and gather a dark, roaring surge of Late Flame along the spine of his heavy cleaver. “Your left shoulder muscle won’t hold a second two-handed crash!” If her spear shaft met that dropping iron cleaver square on the cross-grain, the shock would tear the stitches out of her wounded shoulder muscle before she could pivot.
Even as he spoke, the leader’s back foot dug into the wet pine step, his shoulders bunching for a single decisive blow meant to break both the White Heron spear and the woman holding it.