The pale blade dropped from the northern ridge like a falling guillotine of white ice, cutting the half-mile distance in two heartbeats. Yet as the freezing air pressure roared down the forty-degree slope, Ilyra’s trained eye read the exact line of its descent. And saw the Measure’s classification logic laid bare.
The blade was not aiming at the spot where Kes’s boots currently stood on the mid-slope shale. It was angling ten feet higher. He drove its main edge straight into the lee of the granite boulders where every White Heron defensive manual in the valley dictated that an escorting spearwoman must shove her charge at the first sign of aerial attack.
Had Ilyra obeyed her lifetime reflex—had she reached out with her left hand to grab Kes’s collar or swept her spear shaft across his chest to force him uphill behind those boulders—she would have pushed him directly into the teeth of the stroke.
Instead of grabbing him, Ilyra kept her left hand on her ash-wood shaft and watched Kes’s boots with total, unblinking attention. The student of the black-roof school didn’t freeze, and he didn’t look up at the sky waiting for his Deeper Bronze escort to pick him up.
