From their overwatch post at the lower ridge turn, Seyun and Daro Kesh sprinted up the shale path the instant the pale blade dissolved into the mountain wind. Before they reached the middle chute, however, they saw Kes emerge from the timber gate of the shepherd watch-post without his wooden crate, jog back down the stepped limestone bank into the drainage gulley, and kneel beside Ilyra on the grey scree.
Crossing the threshold from Deeper Bronze into Early Jade under four in a row strikes of a Measure blade—without a spirit pill, a prepared chamber, or a stationary formation—had drained Ilyra’s spirit veins to the dregs. Her face was the color of chalk beneath a sheen of cold sweat, and when she tried to push herself up on her shortened spear, her right arm trembled too wildly to lock the elbow.
There was no false pride or awkward hierarchy on the open hillside. Kes knelt at her left side, draped her arm squarely across his shoulders where the medicine crate had ridden ten minutes earlier, picked up her cracked marsh-iron spear in his free left hand. Then it lifted the newly minted Early Jade fighter onto her boots.
Watching his student carry the White Heron prodigy down the dangerous shale track with the same steady, flat-footed right heel and slanted left toe he had used going up, Daro Kesh stopped halfway up the path and let out a quiet breath that was as close to a smile as his scarred…
