In the center of the drained basin, the Bronze Court rider widened his stance behind the granite stone stand and swung both halves of his ten-foot hooked chain into a timed together, double-layered wheel of whistling iron. The third clash had confirmed everything his fifteen years of recovery service had taught him about sect prodigies. Give a proud young spear fighter a contested object on a stone stand in front of forty witnesses. Their own honor would force them to keep lunging into the snare until their shoulder tore or their shaft snapped.
To press that advantage and force Ilyra into a desperate fourth lunge before she could catch her breath, the rider angled the outer rim of his whirling chain two feet wider on the southern pass. The three-pronged barbed grapnel at the tip of the right-hand chain hissed past Ilyra’s left ear, skimmed across the stone apron at the southern edge of the basin. Then it cracked against the lower cedar shutter of the southern treatment room directly behind her.
Dry cedar wood split with a loud report like a pistol shot. A three-inch splintered furrow opened across the shutter plank, less than four feet from the inside wall where Mina was kneeling by Vey’s litter with a bowl of warm reed-ash decoction and Joren was sitting propped on his straw cot. Inside the room, Vey let out a muffled gasp as dust shook down from the window frame. Mina didn’t drop the medicine bowl, but Seyun saw…
