The noon council scattered to eat boiled barley and dried mutton by the lower windbreak. Then, Ilyra walked with Seyun to the eastern flat stone slabs of the seal court to lay out the exact footwork of her proposal. The cold light of early afternoon showed every scar on her White Heron spear. It had already lost its outer section in the northern chamber. Just then, she intercepted Reth Mal’s pale blade for Seyun, and two days ago on the hillside medicine run, her Early Jade breakthrough had cracked the leftover ash shaft along the grain. Tight bindings of soaked and dried rawhide now wrapped the middle two feet of the wood.
She grounded the iron butt of the shortened spear on the frost-whitened dark rock. Then she drew a short arc with the steel tip three feet to the right of Seyun’s starting mark.
The eastern flat stone slabs of the seal court lay near the broken drainage water gate where melted frost trickled down toward the ravine. Ilyra and Seyun walked out to measure the ground. Then, the wind tugged at the rawhide strips binding the middle of her White Heron spear. Seyun noticed that she had rubbed cold sheep fat into the rawhide knots that morning so the winter damp wouldn’t slacken the tension over the split ash grain.
