With Ilyra’s White Heron spear gone from the southern threshold of the recess, the twenty-foot span between the western dark rock stone support prop and the southern drainage lip now rested entirely on sixty-year-old Hall Mistress Soran. During the first two watches, Soran had been able to keep her horse-stance compact behind the square rock notch of the western stone support prop. Meanwhile, Ilyra covered every high-angle shear that banked across the southern half of the roof.
Now, as the first and second pale blades of the upper ring dove at the same time toward the western and southern brows of the granite shelter, Soran had to cover twelve feet of ice-glazed threshold alone with fifty inches of plain valley iron that already carried a five-degree bend in the middle of its shaft.
Not once—not in the tilt of her grey head, not in the set of her weathered jaw, and not in a single word spoken between breaths—did Hall Mistress Soran express regret or recrimination that her former student had left the ridge to guard a villager’s family on the lower road. For forty years Soran had taught young women at White Heron Hall that a spear’s point should be light enough to answer a sparrow’s landing and its butt heavy enough to hold a bridge. Seeing Ilyra live that principle on the dark switchbacks below filled the deaf Hall Mistress with a fierce, quiet steadiness.
