From the doorway of the narrow limewashed storeroom, Ilyra took half a step forward between the pine linen-racks. Her hand tightened on the ashwood shaft of her spear.
She wasn’t speaking out of arrogance or sect disdain. Her pale face was still drawn with the memory of catching Seyun’s shoulder ten minutes ago when his knee had cracked against the flat stone slabs, and in her voice was the genuine, urgent alarm of a martial prodigy who had spent her entire life studying the physics of realm crossings.
“Healer Mina,” Ilyra said earnestly, “I don’t question your skill with needles or cooling paste. If it were a broken bone or a marsh fever, I’d hold the basin for you myself without a word. Yet a realm boundary between Coal and Flame isn’t a fever that can be parcelled out in spoonfuls by a sand-glass!”
She gestured with her left hand toward Seyun’s bare left collarbone. There, the body wire of Place I still glowed like a buried ember beneath the skin. “The twelve chest gates of the Flame realm are linked in a single nonstop ring. Every manual in White Heron Hall and the Aperture Court agrees on one law: when the breakthrough tide rises, the fighter must ride its peak driving force through all six circuits in a single unbroken breath. If you choke the tide off with silver needles five times in the middle and let his channels cool for fifteen minutes between turns, the driving force of…
