For half a breath after Mina’s voice rang off the limewashed stone walls of the storeroom, Seyun’s muscles remained locked in the blind, stubborn reflex of the outer-hall stance. His right knee ground against the flat stone slab, his left boot braced to rise. The trapped Bronze-grade echo hammering like a white-hot piston against the hardened scar tissue of his fourth rib.
Mina didn’t wait for him to debate her order. Still kneeling on the wet hem of her river-splashed grey cloak, she reached down with her free right hand, hooked two fingers behind the rigid tendon of his left ankle. Then she jerked his braced foot three inches forward across the smooth stone floor.
Deprived of its rigid three-sided base, the fourth base stance collapsed at once. Seyun dropped from his knee onto his hip against the folded canvas tarpaulin. His spine slid back against the cool limewashed wall with a ragged, reflex gasp.
“Don’t lock your chest muscle to catch it—bend your knees up toward your chin and let your belly go slack!” Mina ordered sharply, her left thumb and forefinger never leaving the bounding wrist blood vessel at his wrist. Meanwhile, her right hand flipped open the brass latches of her cedar apothecary chest. “You’re treating an internal backwash as if a man were pushing against your shield! Every time you stiffen your belly wall in that idiot sect stance, you compress your inferior vena cava and drive the trapped heat straight back up into your heart…
