Two breaths before the dropping pale blade reached the shale outcropping, Nara Soth stepped laterally off the frost-split boulder instead of rising to meet the light head-on. Every martial instinct sharpened over three hundred years of solitary survival screamed at her to widen her Crown aura by twenty yards—to throw a backup curtain over Daro Kesh’s head lest the heavier body of the blade crush his knees, and a third curtain over the western under-road drain lest a stray splinter strike the cooper’s children.
Had she yielded to that impulse, her dorsal restraint scars would have split open from neck to waist. Her wide aura would have fused all three defensive lanes into a single rigid target for the Measure’s upper ring.
Instead, Nara accepted the strict boundaries that Ilyra and Daro had just drawn around her. Down by the ditch, the people belonged to Ilyra’s shortened spear and Seyun’s braced ash staff. Here on the mid-slope rock shelf, the main falling mass belonged to Daro Kesh’s twenty-two-inch blade.
Daro stood on the grey shale with his knees slightly bent and his left hand resting lightly behind his hip. The short sword in his right fist bore no fuller, no gilt guard, and none of the decorative ridge fold that his student Kes had told him to hammer flat at the Ash Reed forge shop two days ago. Its broad, dark-grey steel held the dense, multi-aimed grain of the three fire-vessel ribs Joren had unbolted using his self-owned heartbeat pause.
