Ilyra stood on the dry flat stone slab apron directly in front of Mina’s treatment room door. She didn’t need a second half-breath to read the opening she had created. By abandoning the stone stand as her target and choosing the living patients behind the door as the sole duty her stance existed to protect, she had forced the Court rider to stretch his Seizing Center between the brass metal tube at his hip and the hall ahead until his own chain pulled its central hub stationary.
She didn’t branch her spear wake into three lines, nor did she step off the doorway stone where a slip in the mud could expose the cedar shutter behind her. Instead, driving off her rear boot with her injured right shoulder tucked smoothly into the line of her spine, Ilyra delivered a single, straight, unbranched Deeper Bronze thrust directly into the two-inch iron eye of the chain’s central joining ring.
The narrowed marsh-iron spearhead threaded the center of the two-inch ring with a sharp, ringing chime of steel on iron, stopping on the thickened bronze collar behind the blade before the point could touch the rider’s breastplate. In the same nonstop motion, Ilyra pivoted her front wrist a quarter-turn clockwise and drove the pinned joining ring sideways against the upright granite base of the broken porch pillar at the edge of the basin.
