While Mother Renn stepped into the doorway to take Seyun’s discarded wool coat and hand fourteen-year-old Lorn a fresh bundle of dry willow-billets for the stove, Mina laid out her instruments on a clean linen towel spread across the flat stone slabs between her knees.
There were no glowing jade magic charms or perfumed sect elixirs in her kit. Everything she unpacked belonged to the cramped, coal-smoke-stained world of the outer-city medicine room in Oran. A wide heavy clay jar of thick, dark-green reed-root and marsh-mallow paste kept cold in wet moss. A flat bone spatula. A roll of raw, unwhitened hemp bandages. A second case of heavy gauge silver needles. And a four-inch brass-framed sand-glass filled with fine white river-quartz, tuned to run out in exactly one quarter of an hour.
Mina drew Seyun’s sweat-dampened linen shirt open across his shoulders. She leaned forward and examined his bare torso in the clear orange light of the stove’s draft-slit and the grey morning daylight filtering down the hall.
Even Ilyra, who had seen plenty of sword-cuts and spear-grazes on the training fields of White Heron Hall, drew a quiet breath from the doorway. Just then, she saw the two halves of the clerk’s chest side by side.
