By the next morning, the fourth-month marsh squall had blown itself out across the eastern river-hills. That left Sluice-Gate Village washed clean under a high, pale-blue spring sky that smelled of wet sedge grass. It opened willow buds, and fresh lime-mortar.
In the narrow gravel courtyard behind the village burial house—where the night’s rainwater had drained cleanly off the northern slope of Marta’s newly slated cottage roof into the ditch without leaving a single damp spot on the pine floorboards inside—Seyun stood bare-handed in his grey wool tunic, facing Ilyra across ten feet of wet river-gravel.
On the low stone bench outside the back kitchen door sat Mina, sipping a mug of hot ginger-water with her grey apothecary cloak wrapped around her shoulders before her skiff rowers made ready for the return trip to Oran, while old Mother Renn, young Tomas, Jarn, and fourteen-year-old Lorn—his bandaged right wrist tucked proudly into the front of his waistcoat—watched from the porch steps.
“Three exchanges, wood and palm only, no steel tip,” Ilyra said. She held her seven-foot ashwood spear reversed so that the rounded iron butt-shoe pointed toward Seyun’s chest and the long steel blade rested safely behind her right shoulder. “Your sister says your left-side bypass held its pressure through the night without a trace of swelling. Show me what your Early Flame does in the open air when it isn’t catching a copper water-tray.”
