Steel rang hard against steel forty paces down the road as Ilyra engaged the first three dismounted swordsmen behind the fourth barley wagon. Even without turning his head to watch, Seyun could read the rhythm of her defense by the sound of her ash shaft rapping against iron saber-guards. Two crisp, economical parries that turned the raiders’ heavy downward chops into the wagon wheel. It was followed by the dry hiss of her Late Flame spearhead sweeping low to clear the ditch bank where Pel and young Tomas were dragging the wounded wagonwright under the axle.
At the forward end of the column, behind the water casks of the lead cart, Custodian Halen was shouting contradictory orders at the four young pike-guards. Telling two of them to form a shield-wall in front of his own crouch while ordering the other two to shoot crossbows they didn’t carry at horsemen who were staying carefully outside pike reach.
Nobody was looking at the middle wagon. Between the dust cloud raised by the circling riders and the high canvas sides of the second and fourth barley carts, the tilted central carriage sat in a pocket of blistering, grease-stinking solitude.
Seyun set his left boot on the iron mounting-stirrup—hot enough now that he could feel the heat through the leather sole of his shoe—and vaulted up onto the narrow tailboard of the third wagon. The oak planks beneath his feet shook like the sounding board of a drum as the trapped young spirit threw itself from side to side inside its casing.
For one clear, cold breath, the habits of eleven hungry years at the bottom of a sect’s roster spoke inside his head with practical simplicity. You owe White Heron Hall nothing, the thought ran. Its steward tried to frame you yesterday. Its custodian tried to take your hands five minutes ago. And even the woman fighting at the rear bound your wrists the first hour she met you. Take one bronze collar-rod off the crate, slip down the ditch into the reed-beds, and let the Aperture Court and White Heron Hall explain to each other why their secret cargo blew up in the mud.
He knew the exact market price of spirit-hardened holding bronze in the lower river wards. A single eight-inch collar rod, soaked with six months of fire-spirit breath, would fetch thirty ounces of silver from an unchartered weapon-smith. Enough to pay off the unpaid debts on Mina’s apothecary servant contract, rent a dry stone room with a coal stove for the rest of the spring, and buy every jar of bitter reed-pith paste he needed to keep his chest channels from inflaming.
More than the silver, walking away now would spare him the humiliating vulnerability of the bond beneath his left collarbone. Long as he stayed beside this caravan. Then, he was a Coal student carrying no spear, dependent on his own eyes and three four-inch copper pins while people a full realm above him swung live steel.
He looked down at the oilcloth packet he had drawn from his inner lapel. He unfolded the greased linen. Then, the three four-inch copper test needles rested side by side in their stitched slots, their shafts polished to a warm reddish gleam by decades of Elder Hesh’s thumb-oil and their tips narrowed to rounded, atraumatic points designed to part spirit vein muscle tissue without severing a vessel.
He remembered Elder Hesh’s stooped shoulders at Ash Reed’s outer gate in the pelting winter rain, the way the old teacher had glanced nervously back toward the council hall before pressing this packet into Seyun’s palm. Hesh had lacked the courage to stand up against Senior Elder Tor Ves. Just then, the patrons demanded a Bronze certificate for Joren. But at the very threshold of the road he had given back the one set of tools that belonged to healing rather than performance.
And Seyun remembered his own answer to Master Uren’s silver-wired skeleton beneath the abbey floor. A self sheltered from contradiction can’t tell strength from borrowed support. If he left this creature to burst in the dark—or if he pried a piece of its cage loose to pay his sister’s rent—then there was no difference at all between him and the test judges who had pulled the spirit’s baffle needle to manufacture Joren’s false breakthrough. Both treated a living thing’s pain as small change to spend on their own convenience.
What Ilyra had shouted as she turned toward the rear wagons echoed in his ears. Prove it now. She had gambled her Hall commission and the lives of the drivers on the belief that his winter accusation had been honest. Answering her meant answering the trust of her turned back.
“Hold still in there,” Seyun muttered against the roaring canvas, though he knew the creature couldn’t understand human speech through two inches of iron and baked clay. “I’m not here to borrow from you. I’m not going to let you cook in their box.”
An iron-tipped arrow thunked into the oak side-rail six inches above his left knee, loosed by one of the circling horse-archers testing whether the central wagon was defended. The shaft shook in the charred wood, its goose-feather fletching singeing almost instantly in the heat rising through the floor seams.
A second arrow sliced through the upper curve of the canvas bow overhead, showering dry flakes of scorched sizing onto his hair. Out in the willow scrub, a rider in an oilskin cape was trotting along the outer drainage bank with a horn bow nocked. It waited for the grey-coated figure on the third wagon to stand upright again.
Seyun dropped flat onto his belly along the scorching floorboards. That kept his head below the level of the oak side-plank while reaching forward to the copper-threaded tarpaulin rope that Halen had forbidden Ilyra to touch. Even through his coarse linen shirt and wool coat, the oak planks burned against his ribs, warming the flat stone of Master Uren’s tablet inside his pocket.
From the forward provisions cart came Custodian Halen’s voice again, shrill with panic as a stray shaft rattled off the water cask above his head: “Form on the first cart! Guards, bring your pikes back to the water barrels! Never mind the rear wagon drivers—if they take my warrant case, you’ll all be flogged in the residence yard!”
Not one of the four young White Heron guards moved to form a circle around Halen’s barrel. Two of them had finally recovered their nerve enough to crouch behind the second cart’s wheel and point their pikes toward the circling horsemen. Meanwhile, the caravan cook threw a bucket of cold porridge-water over a smoking harness strap.
On the tilted bed of the third wagon, the leaden trial pellets stamped with the pale sky-slit were too thick to untie by hand, and when Seyun pulled his four-inch herb-paring knife from his belt, the thin iron blade merely skittered off the braided copper wire. Inside the tarp, the fire spirit gave another choking double-cough that made the iron blade collar bolts scream in their holes.
Seyun didn’t waste time sawing at cold wire. He hooked the copper seal-cord over the jagged, red-hot corner of the warped iron blade collar bracket at the tailboard and pulled hard with both hands wrapped in the thick wool skirt of his grey coat.
Softened by the six-hundred-degree heat streaming from the bracket. The heat-softened copper wire was stretched like warm taffy, glowed dull orange at the bend, and snapped cleanly in two.
Working with rapid, practiced fingers while keeping his spine pressed low between the side-rails, Seyun whipped the loosened tarpaulin rope out of the iron cleats along the right side-board and threw the heavy grey canvas flap back over the roof bows.
Beneath the outer canvas lay a second shroud of alum-soaked felt, intended by the storehouse clerks to muffle the sound of the spirit’s breathing while passing through town gates. The felt was baked brittle as autumn leaves and split down the middle at the first tug of Seyun’s fingers. He exposed the heavy oak packing blocks wedged between the wagon ribs and the inner iron frame.
Two of those oak blocks were already smoldering along their lower edges where the heat from the right axle housing had crept up the bolts. Seyun kicked the smoldering wedges over the tailboard into the mud so they wouldn’t catch flame in the wind.
A wave of trapped, fire-dry air rolled out from beneath the oilcloth, striking his face like the blast from an opened kiln door and making his eyes water instantly. Yet the stench that rose from the inside of the wagon was not the clean stone smell of sulfur or forge-coal. Seyun parted the inner shroud and looked down into the cradle. Then, the heat that rolled out smelled of scorched marrow, glass-fused clay, and old blood.