Ilyra entered the three-foot gap beneath the wobbling bronze drum at the end of the first breath. Then, she held no illusions about the weapon in her hands. An hour before midnight on the lower hillside, when the Measure’s pale needle had dived toward the refugee carter Mer and his children, Ilyra had driven her full-length White Heron ash spear into the frozen road to turn the blow. Snapping the seasoned wood shaft in two and leaving her with only the eighteen-inch marsh-iron spearhead and six inches of splintered ash wrapped in rawhide. In storybooks told around valley taverns, a warrior whose spear broke before the final battle always discovered that the shortened leftover piece was mysteriously superior to the whole weapon.
Ilyra knew better. Without her five feet of ash shaft, she had lost her reach. Her wide swept leverage, and the safe standoff distance that White Heron Hall’s third-rank forms relied upon to keep a spearwoman’s ribs out of the teeth of a heavy array. Entering the lower returning hub with an eighteen-inch stub meant bringing her own knees, hands, and face within arm’s length of the scissoring pale vanes.
Yet she refused to pretend the damage was a blessing. Because of that, she used the stub for the one cold clockwork reality it actually possessed. A thick, forged marsh-iron head with twin side-lugs that couldn’t flex or snap when driven straight into a narrow stone clearance.
