The four-foot crescent of condensed white current struck Ilyra’s raised White Heron spear ten paces upslope of the switchback bend with a sound like a lightning bolt splitting a lone marsh oak.
Ilyra had carried that six-foot ash-and-marsh-iron spear from the day she walked out of White Heron Hall’s trial into exile. With it she had crossed Seyun’s staff on the limewashed burial road, held the dark stairs of the lower shrine beside Kes and Pera. Then she climbed four watches of frozen rock toward the Hollow Summit. Every inch of its seasoned ash shaft knew the turn of her wrists, and at the moment of impact she poured the full, unreserved clarity of her Early Jade training into the Rising Heron Wing block. Angling the forged cross-lug below the marsh-iron spearhead outward toward the western gorge lip.
For one blinding, heroic heartbeat on the narrow shale road, the marsh-iron spearhead and its forged cross-lug caught the center of the four-foot white crescent and twisted its downward vector thirty degrees outward away from the cliff wall and away from Mer’s family eighty yards below.
Then the full four-ton high-pressure weight of the dropping current bore down on the upper third of the wooden shaft—right across the three-inch frost-crack she had taken during the first watch’s defense of the recess roof.
