Daro’s short sword sped up to true Early Jade speed at the start of the fourth exchange. Then, the leisurely half-beat Seyun had been using to listen to Kes’s boots vanished instantly.
The dark, compact plane of fire steel was six inches from piercing the center seam. It hummed with the dense, multi-track weight Daro had forged in the northern chamber. Behind Seyun’s right shoulder, Kes was still exposed in the open flat stone slabs between the first and second pillars with thirty pounds of wooden splints in his arms.
In that split second of genuine combat squeezing, Seyun’s brain didn’t reach for the new, fragile listening stance of Ilyra’s echo. It reached for the oldest, deepest muscle memory he owned from eleven winters on Ash Reed’s wet flat stone slabs and months of guarding caravans on the road. take control of the space and put the unsafe person behind stone.
In the quarter-heartbeat as Daro’s short blade flashed toward the gap, Seyun’s eyes took in the shape of the eastern flat stone slabs. Then it made an instant, authoritative math.
Two paces behind Kes’s right shoulder stood the recessed granite corner of the second eastern pillar—a solid stone niche where Daro’s sword plane couldn’t easily reach. In Seyun’s mind, that stone niche was the obvious, safest shelter in the court.
