The seventh dawn didn’t arrive with the slow, grey creeping of marsh light through the courtyard outside. Inside Seyun’s chest, it arrived at the exact instant the eastern horizon turned the color of cold pewter. It struck outward from the body wire of Place I like a white-hot iron wedge driven under a hammer.
All night in the narrow limewashed storeroom, Seyun had sat propped between the pine linen-racks while young Lorn dozed on a stool beside the cast-iron chimney pipe stove, waking every hour to slide another billet of dry willow-wood into the firebox and ladle a cup of fresh well-water into the broad three-gallon copper sterilization tray steaming on the top-plate.
Across the six-foot aisle, Ilyra had not slept at all. She sat upright on her low wooden bench by the door post with her ashwood spear across her knees. She watched the sweat-soaked linen of Seyun’s shirt rise and fall in short, shallow four-counts.
Then, at the first distant cry of a curlew over the canal weir, the seven-dawn clock in Place I reached zero.
The cold wire behind Seyun’s breastbone vanished in a single, blinding surge of heat.
It wasn’t the small, manageable warmth that had opened his Late Coal channels in Oran. Because Ilyra had crossed a major realm divide from Late Flame into consolidated Early Bronze under the life-and-death pressure of twenty shields on Old Dredger’s Sluice, the culmination wave that poured into Seyun’s solar nerve web carried the full load-bearing weight of a…
