Three hundred and fifty yards down the southern mountain face, the air on the third shale switchback was filled with the scared braying of the limping winter-grain mule and the high, whistling shriek of the approaching four-foot crescent blade. Villager Mer had backed his wife, his six-year-old daughter. His twelve-year-old son flat against the frozen granite retaining wall on the inside of the road bend, positioning the heavy barley-laden mule and his own wool-coated back between the children and the upper turn of the trail.
Mer had no training beyond a carter’s calloused hands and a short iron crowbar pulled from the mule’s tool-strap. But the forty-year-old villager stood in front of his family with the iron bar raised in both mittens as the blinding blue-white glare of the detached crescent rounded the upper horn of the switchback forty yards above them, shearing through roadside boulders like soft cheese.
Six breaths before the crescent could cover those forty yards of road, two figures burst out of the steep, forty-five-degree avalanche chute directly above the retaining wall in a cloud of flying black scree and powdered snow.
Ilyra hit the twelve-foot-wide shale road of the third switchback first. Her boots took in the twenty-foot drop from the chute lip in a deep, rolling White Heron landing that brought her up squarely in the center of the trail ten paces upslope of Mer and the mule. Half a second behind her, Bel Sar crashed down off the retaining wall onto the roadbed…
