Landing on his boots at the bottom of the drainage gulley twenty paces ahead of her, Kes didn’t crouch down and wait for Ilyra to come build a wall around him. Obeying the exact agreement they had made at the seal court gate, he right away began scrambling up the steep, stepped limestone bank on the far side of the gulley toward the open timber gate of the shepherd watch-post.
With every stride Kes took up that far bank, the distance, height, and angle between protector and protected changed. Under Ilyra’s old Deeper Bronze, her Branching White Wake would have collapsed the moment the person she was guarding moved twenty paces outside her immediate reach.
Behind her, the pale blade pivoted horizontally five feet off the shale and screamed across the slope to cut Kes off before he could top the gulley rim.
Ilyra leaped down the fractured rock into the path of the level sweep and planted her boots in the gravel of the gulley lip. The marsh-iron head of her shortened spear met the second strike of the pale blade. Then, the impact drove her shins three inches into the loose stone. And inside her spirit veins, the rigid walls of her Bronze focus gave way to something clear, fluid, and alive.
