Ilyra had seen what happened when Daro Kesh’s Deeper Bronze sword met Reth Mal’s Jade blade head-on.
If she thrust her Early Bronze spear straight into the path of Reth’s second strike to block it by force, her ash shaft would snap like dry kindling and the Jade point would impale both Daro and sixteen-year-old Halin behind him.
So as Ilyra abandoned the doorway arch and lunged across the narrow aisle between the pillar and the beds, she didn’t try to stop Reth Mal’s blade.
Remembering the reed-marsh raid where she had first formed her Branching White Wake—and using every ounce of the rear-hip and heel rotation Nara Soth had drilled into her upstairs—Ilyra drove the marsh-iron head of her spear in at a steep thirty-degree side angle, hooking the cross-lug of her spearhead squarely against the flat outer cheek of Reth Mal’s advancing Jade blade three inches below its point.
Instead of pushing straight back against the unstoppable linear driving force of a Middle Jade thrust, Ilyra used the two branching currents of her wake like a boatman’s pole catching a drifting log in a flood—levering her entire body weight across her rear heel to deflect the line of Reth’s stroke twenty degrees to the left, away from Daro’s kneeling shoulder and away from Halin’s occupied bed, straight toward the only safe target within reach:
