Morning light slanted across the two dozen scored granite pillars of the abandoned seal court as Chief Examiner Vaska Ren adjusted the bronze gimbal ring of his test pressure lens on the central stone stand. Twelve paces in front of the quartz disk, Ilyra planted her boots in White Heron Hall’s fifth custodial ward. In her hands she held the shortened marsh-iron spear that had accompanied her since Seyun freed it from Mother Renn’s funerary shrine. Now ten inches shorter in the shaft after she had sacrificed its outer section to intercept Reth Mal’s pale blade for Seyun in the northern chamber.
Behind her heels stood three painted wooden blocks representing non-combatant porters. Since earning Early Bronze in the reed marsh during the caravan raid and deepening that Bronze at the snow bridge against Commander Arel Fen, Ilyra had built her entire martial identity around her Branching White Wake. The ability to split a single spear thrust into many same-time defensive lines so no attacker could slip past her point to harm the people in her care.
Vaska opened the coal-stone shutter with a quiet rasp of his scarred throat. Then, the pale refracted beam shot across the flat stone slabs toward her.
