Those two stuttering breaths in the pale blade’s turn were the entire margin between an escape and a burial. Inside the smoke-filled incense hall of the hillside shrine, eleven of the twelve tenant families had already made it out the western gate toward Nara Soth’s ditch. Only the valley cooper, his pregnant wife, and their two small boys remained inside, trapped behind an overturned cedar offering table near the rear post where the cooper had been wildly trying to untie his family’s two winter milk goats.
“Leave the tether!” Ilyra shouted from the side threshold. Her boots planted was wide in the spilled ash of the fire bowl as she drove the marsh-iron head of her shortened spear into the jammed oak lattice of the side doorway. With four inches of forward shaft missing since the northern chamber, she couldn’t lever the beam from a safe distance. She had to set her bruised left shoulder directly against the shortened wood and pour her Deeper Bronze Branching White Wake into the iron collar.
The jammed oak lattice burst outward off its wooden pegs. Ilyra’s branching wake fanned across the five-foot gap. Not fighting the pale blade dropping through the roof rafters above, which was not her assigned task. But sweeping the falling ceiling plaster and burning incense coals aside to hold a clear, breathable lane for the living people she had chosen to protect.
