The outer two feet of Ilyra’s marsh-iron spear—the weapon Seyun had secretly funded for her in Oran with his last strings of copper cash before he learned how to give help honestly—lay cold and cut near the center of the chamber floor where Reth Mal’s directed pale blade had snapped it half an hour ago. What remained in Ilyra’s hands was a five-foot ash-and-iron truncheon ending in a jagged collar of split wood just behind the surviving socket wedge.
Yet as Ilyra planted her lead boot over the dark droplets of Nara Soth’s blood on the chalk rim and met Reth Mal’s furious rush across the right-hand lane, there was no pause in her shoulders and no mourning for her lost reach.
Reth whipped his pronged channel blade horizontally to sweep her out of Nara’s breathing window. Then, Ilyra didn’t try the wide, graceful White Heron cloud-block that needed a full seven-foot shaft. Instead, anchoring her Deeper Bronze focus on the principle she had proved in the snowstorm at the gorge bridge she stepped inside the arc of Reth’s longer weapon, caught his heavy shaft below the bronze joining ring with her branching white wake, and used the compact leverage of her shortened spear to wedge his strike upward into the empty air. That a point existed solely for what it protected.
