Ten minutes later, Weapon-Master Maren and Elder Corin marched back down the frosted steps onto the watching platform. Ahead of them walked Ilyra, a fresh wool cloak draped over her left shoulder. Meanwhile, a senior hall medic finished binding a clean pressure pad over the torn stitches under her right collarbone. Her face was pale from the cold and the blood loss. But she carried her marsh-iron spear upright in her left hand. Then she took her place beside the bench without leaning on the rail.
Behind her, two pike-guards hauled Senior Disciple Vane down the stone steps by his leather shoulder-straps and forced him to his knees on the frost-rimed flat stone slabs six paces in front of Hall Mistress Soran. Elder Corin followed with the seven-foot ash spear. He laid it across the stone bench so that the foot-long leaf blade and its two bloodied iron barbs—still wedged inside a fractured ten-pound chunk of Gable Crag limestone—rested directly before Soran’s knees.
Weapon-Master Maren dropped the oiled canvas frost-sheath beside the stone chunk. “Lead weights sewn into the hem of the canvas sheath so it wouldn’t blow away when he stripped it, Hall Mistress. A double-pinned brass collar on the socket. That head wasn’t mounted in the warming-shed. It was fitted in a workshop with an armorer’s vise.”
