In the quiet sunlight after the witnesses left, Ilyra held out her right hand. Not with a spear shaft in the palm, and not to seal a new training wager, but simply to offer her friendship without another martial condition attached to it.
Seyun clasped her forearm with his uninjured right hand, accepting the offer as plainly as it was given. Then he glanced down at the oiled canvas wrap resting across the carpenter’s frame stand under the garden roof edges. There, the surviving steel head of her White Heron spear lay beside a wood plane and an iron rivet punch.
That spearhead carried the history of their entire journey across its hardened bevels. Forged with the marsh iron Seyun had secretly funded at the ferry landing, it had lost its outer shaft section intercepting Reth Mal’s chamber-amplified blade in the first northern fight, cracked its middle shaft when Ilyra reached Early Jade escorting Kes up the hillside under a pale blade. Then she finally snapped down to a foot-long grip behind the socket. Meanwhile, she shielded villager Mer’s family during the Twelfth Night escape. With that stubby leftover piece, she had pinned a lower hub blade for Seyun and hooked his collar clear of the falling iron.
