Where the dark rock switchback branched above the lower hospice gorge, the whistling noise in the upper sky sharpened into a dry, nonstop hiss, like a scythe blade drawn down a thirty-foot grindstone. Down on the wooded knoll a quarter-mile ahead, woodsmoke rose from the cedar-shingled roof of the hillside shrine where twelve displaced farm families from White Heron’s lower reed lands were boiling morning gruel. Instinctively, Ilyra and Daro shifted closer to Hall Mistress Soran’s left and right shoulders. Their boots dropped into the classic three-sided vanguard spacing that every chartered sect in the river valleys taught for meeting an aerial strike.
Soran didn’t wait for them to settle their weight. Swinging the hand-wrapped shaft of her plain iron spear across the dirt trail, she cut a deep level furrow through the pine needles between her boots and theirs, halting both of them in mid-stride.
“Break that spacing,” Soran ordered. The twenty-year-old northern expedition had damaged the bones of her inner ears. Because of that, her voice carried the flat, unmodulated certainty of a drill bell. She turned her head sharply so she could read every face on the trail. “Don’t close on my spear, and don’t wait for my rhythm.”
