Nara Soth’s opening stroke carried no more raw physical weight than Bel Sar’s staff had carried in Ash Reed’s auction yard. No more channel speed than Ilyra’s spear in yesterday’s afternoon drill. Had an observer measured only the quantity of cultivated breath moving through her single right arm, they would have called it an ordinary mature Bronze thrust. What made the hair stand up on Seyun’s forearms was where and when the wooden metal ring arrived.
She didn’t thrust high at the suspended grey tablet behind his shoulder. She swing toward his braced left fifth and sixth ribs to test his flinch. Instead, as Seyun shifted two ounces of weight onto the ball of his front right foot to prepare his Returning Step, the tip of Nara’s walking staff tapped the lower third of his ash stave. Four inches below his bottom hand, at the exact fractional beat where his ankle tendon was committed to the stone and couldn’t yet rebound.
In the first half-breath of Exchange One, as Nara Soth’s wooden walking staff crossed the six paces of frost at throttled mature Bronze speed, Seyun marveled at the utter absence of wasted motion in her single right arm. He had sparred against Bel Sar at Ash Reed or defended against Ilyra’s spear yesterday afternoon. Then, even the cleanest Bronze technique gave half a beat of practice tension in the shoulder or wrist before the point arrived.
