In the dark yard, the sound of Kes’s boot catching the stone drainage groove was clear. A sharp leather scuff, followed instantly by the tight intake of breath through the boy’s teeth as his weakened left ankle—still tender from the old Court substitute-method strain Daro had treated in autumn—twisted sideways on the two-inch drop.
Kes stumbled backward toward the wellhead curb, his balance point breaking at the hip. Just then, Bel Sar’s seven-foot padded pole came whistling down from the high northwest slanted for the third exchange.
Six feet away on the northern track, Pera heard the boy’s ankle twist in the dark before Seyun’s staff had even finished sliding off Bel’s second stroke.
Without a split second’s pause, the veteran caravan defender abandoned her northward walk toward the porch steps, pivoted toward the drainage groove. Then she made an instant human choice. To free both of her hands so she could catch Kes’s right elbow and steady his twisting joint before he fell against the stone wellhead, Pera opened her fingers and deliberately dropped the brimming ten-inch clay bowl of water straight toward the flat stone slabs.
In the pitch blackness, Seyun heard both things happen inside the same tenth of a breath. To his left-rear, the sharp intake of Kes’s breath and the lunge of Pera’s boots coming across to catch the boy’s arm. Three feet in front of his right toe, the heavy, water-filled clay bowl falling through empty air toward the hard granite tiles.
