Rising from her knee in the middle of the narrow mountain road with four and a half feet of her spear shaft lying in smoking splinters behind her heel, Ilyra didn’t waste half a breath looking down at the ruined length of her signed name weapon. In her two gloved hands she held what remained. Ten inches of dark marsh-iron spearhead with its stout forged cross-lug, mounted on eight inches of jagged, splintered ash wood—an eighteen-inch close-range iron spike.
Above her and forty yards down the grade toward Mer’s family, the top stone ledge of black shale that the dying crescent had clipped was already sliding down the fifty-degree embankment in a roaring cascade of three-hundred-pound stone slabs and frozen gravel, threatening to sweep the limping grain mule and Mer’s twelve-year-old son off the road twenty yards short of the heavy log under-road drain.
“Leave the broken tail in the snow, girl—come on!” Bel Sar bellowed, surging past Ilyra’s shoulder down the switchback grade with his tarred-hemp-bound, splintered Ash Reed staff held in a wide two-handed quarry-lever grip. “You split the big slabs on the crack-grain with that short iron point. I’ll lever the halves over the outer lip before they hit the roadbed!”
