For three minutes after the raiders’ hooves died away into the eastern willow gullies, no one on the road spoke above a murmur. The only sounds were the rhythmic, calmed rushing of the three copper needles beneath Seyun’s wet marsh-wort sack, the crackle of the clerk’s manifest cart settling into a bed of glowing charcoal. The heavy breathing of Pel, Tomas, Corren, and Jarn as they climbed out of the southern reed ditch.
Remarkably, despite twelve mounted attackers, refined fire-oil fire. A consolidated Bronze swordsman, not a single human life had been lost in the column. Two of the four guard post pike-guards had fled up the road at the first pitch-pot. The leftover two had taken minor bruises and a broken pike shaft at the front cart. Corren had a shallow crossbow graze across his left forearm. And every single hundred-pound sack of winter barley lay intact and dry inside its animal fat-rubbed hemp weave on the flattened sedge stalks.
Even the young fire spirit inside the third wagon had quieted from its wild, hammering panic into a slow, steady double-beat breath out, cooled by the wet horse-blanket and the open middle louver now that the carriage sat twelve feet clear of the embers.
Custodian Halen crawled out from behind the front wheel of the third wagon last of all, his blue-trimmed Court robe caked from hem to collar with black ditch mud and his right wrist swollen purple where Ilyra’s spear-butt had numbed his arm. He saw the tarnished brass tally-badge of the Second Board resting on Seyun’s blistered palm. Then, the leftover color drained out of his plump cheeks until he looked like animal fat candle-wax.
“That—that’s a forged token,” Halen stammered, though his voice lacked even the memory of conviction as he backed away from both of them toward the lead barley cart. “A stolen storehouse tally! Bandits often loot brass tokens from dead couriers...”
Neither Ilyra nor Seyun wasted breath answering him. A storehouse officer who sewed his Second Board tally-badge inside the silk lining of a plain black coat before leading an arson raid on his own Court’s manifest cart was not a bandit who had looted a courier. He was a house cleaner sent by the men who had signed the false stone-ash manifest in Oran. And Halen, sitting gray-faced on the shaft of the lead cart, knew now that his superiors had been perfectly willing to burn him alive alongside the ledger boxes.
Ilyra walked deliberately to the tailboard of the fourth barley wagon. She set her ashwood spear upright against the timber rail, unclasped the silver heron-pin at her throat. Then she drew her blood-soaked white wool cloak and split leather shoulder plate off her right shoulder.
The cavalry saber had cut through the linen tunic beneath. Then he opened a clean, four-inch gash across the outer curve of her right shoulder muscle. She had fought five full-weight exchanges against a Bronze sword right away afterward. Because of that, the torn muscle fibers were still oozing dark crimson blood down her upper arm. Even so, the main tendon and bone beneath remained untouched.
“Sit on the tailboard,” Seyun said quietly, coming up beside the fourth wagon with a wooden pail of clean water drawn from the lead cask and his unrolled oilcloth medicine kit under his left arm. “If you try to bind a right shoulder muscle one-handed with your left teeth, the bandage will slip the first time you lift a spear.”
Ilyra looked down at the two long heat-blisters across his right knuckles from the red-hot coupling wrench, then sat on the oak tailboard without argument. “You have water-blisters across three fingers of your sword hand, Clerk.”
“I don’t use a sword, and blisters don’t bleed onto the linen,” Seyun replied simply. Dipping a square of boiled white cloth into the clean water, he washed the dried soot and clotted blood from the edges of the four-inch cut with the steady, practiced lightness he had learned assisting Mina and Mother Renn in the outer-hall sick room.
Beneath his own left collarbone, the cold body wire of Place I gradually eased its sharp ringing as the bleeding slowed under the cold water and crushed green paste of fresh marsh-wort leaves. It settled into a dull, watchful warmth that mirrored the closing of the wound.
Ilyra didn’t flinch once as the astringent herb paste touched the raw muscle. Sitting upright on the tailboard while he wrapped a tight figure-eight of dry linen around her shoulder and under her arm, her pale eyes surveyed the road, the ditch-settled third wagon, and the inside of the fourth cart behind her hip.
Halfway through the third turn of the bandage, her gaze stopped on the front left leaf-spring of the fourth wagon.
Even with all twenty sacks of winter barley rolled off the bed into the southern ditch, the front end of the fourth cart’s frame directly beneath the driver’s bench was riding half an inch lower on its iron shackles than an empty wagon should sit.
While Seyun tied off the linen knot above her collarbone, Ilyra reached her uninjured left hand backward beneath the folded spare canvas tarpaulin that lay lashed under the driver’s footboard. Her fingers struck something hard, dense, and box-shaped, wrapped tightly in tied grey oilcloth and lashed to the floorboards with new hemp twine so it wouldn’t rattle on the stones.
With a single tug of her left wrist, she slid the bundle out onto the tailboard beside her hip and flipped back the corner of the oilcloth.
Inside lay four flat, dark-gray billets of river-dredged marsh iron. Ten pounds apiece, forty pounds in all, each bar forged with curved leather-lined lashing grooves along its inner face so a spear fighter could bind the dead weight around an ashwood shaft during threshold drills.
In White Heron Hall, inner-hall students preparing to cross from Late Flame into Early Bronze used river-dredged marsh iron to weight their spear shafts. That was because the dense, silt-hardened ore absorbed stray shakes and forced the wrists to project a single unbroken line of intention. Forty pounds of refined marsh iron cost four full silver pieces in Oran. More than an outer-hall clerk earned in half a year of copying dockets.
Pel, who was walking past the tailboard carrying a rescued barley sack on his shoulder, glanced down at the dark iron bars and smiled approvingly through his beard. “Ah, you found your training weights, Commander! I made sure the smith’s lad at the Reed-Ford ferry lashed ’em tight under the fourth bench just like the young clerk here paid him to do before we crossed. Four silver bits on the barrel-head, and told us not to bother you with the receipt while you were watching the river!”
Pel heaved the barley sack onto the front bed. Then he walked back toward the ditch, wholly unaware of the silence that had fallen over the tailboard behind him.
Seyun didn’t pull his hands back from the finished linen knot on her shoulder, nor did he look away toward the ditch. He had known when he paid the ferry smith’s apprentice that the iron would eventually come out from under the canvas. He had simply not expected her to find it. Meanwhile, his fingers were still stained with the marsh-wort paste from her wound.
Each of the four ten-pound bars bore the fresh, unrusted file-marks of the Reed-Ford ferry forge shop along its bevels. The leather lashing thongs coiled neatly beside them had been greased with animal fat so they wouldn’t chafe the lacquer of a White Heron spear shaft. Every detail of the bundle had been chosen by someone who had read her training records line by line.
Even the weight spreading—two ten-pound bars for the forward balance point behind the socket and two ten-pound bars for the rear grip above the butt-cap—matched the exact Late Flame conditioning regimen prescribed in White Heron Hall’s inner manual, a regimen she had left behind in Oran. Just then, she left in haste with the barley convoy.
Looking at those four dark billets resting on the grey oilcloth, any inner-hall teacher would have recognized the hand of a scroll-keeper who knew the exact ounce at which her spear-tip had begun to tremble during the winter trials.
Ilyra’s left hand rested flat upon the cold, dark surface of the forty-pound iron bundle. Slowly she raised her head and looked at Seyun standing two feet in front of her with the half-used roll of linen bandage still in his blistered hands.
“You bought river-dredged shaft-weights at the ferry landing,” she said, her voice very low and level, “and had the drivers hide them under the fourth wagon’s canvas so I’d think the Hall armory had packed them.”