For two heartbeats on the frozen shelf, the older woman and the younger woman stood shoulder to shoulder under the flickering silver metal tube.
Nara Soth had expected an argument. Over three hundred years of wandering the high provinces, whenever younger fighters had discovered who she was and what the scars across her back meant, they had always spoken to her in one of two voices. Either they begged her to save them with the lost arts of the Listening Crown, or they made grand, tearful speeches about honor and dying together under the open sky. She had prepared her answers for both voices long before she ever climbed the northern stair.
Ilyra used neither.
She didn’t reach for Nara’s arm, and she didn’t look at the dry six-foot circle waiting four paces ahead. Instead, Ilyra tilted her chin ten degrees to the east. She pointed with the scarred iron tip of her eighteen-inch spear stub toward the narrow gap where the eastern fault trough met the upper rim of the ridge.
“Soran’s right wrist is swollen too tight to hook the outer edge for a full pass,” Ilyra said, her voice as flat and practical as a sergeant dividing watch duty before a night rain. “Keth and Vaska need four breaths inside the recess to bind one of Hesh’s cedar splints along her forearm so her thumb doesn’t dislocate on the next block. While she’s behind the door post, which upper lane needs covering first—the upright drop over the…
