Nara Soth didn’t offer Ilyra an ancient Balance footwork diagram or a secret method for hiding aura from the quartz lens. Resting her chin on her single hand atop her walking staff, she asked the White Heron prodigy one plain question: what made a martial defense successful after the people it protected chose a different risk than the one their protector had planned for?
Educated since her ninth year in the strict, honorable custodial code of White Heron Hall, Ilyra answered without pause. When an ordinary caravan driver, villager, or patient placed themselves under a spearwoman’s escort, the spearwoman assumed responsibility for their survival. If a frightened porter panicked. Then he stepped out of cover toward an exposed cliff edge during a raid, martial responsibility meant blocking that porter with the spear shaft and forcing them back into the safe pocket.
In Ilyra’s mind, allowing a charge to step into preventable harm when she had the strength to stop them was no different from abandoning her post in the reed marsh where driver Pel had died.
Nara listened without mockery. That was because she recognized her own three-hundred-year glow in the younger woman’s voice. For hundreds of years, Nara too had believed that having the strongest arm on the field gave her both the duty and the right to decide where everyone else stood.
