Seyun laid the three sheets of heavy mulberry paper flat on the dry end of the stone frame stand bench, weighting their corners with his leather Account Book and a brass ink-case from Mina’s satchel. Because his palms were still wrapped in thick linen over yesterday’s scalds, he couldn’t pinch a brush in the standard three-finger clerk’s grip without pressing the raw blisters across his first knuckles. Instead, he wedged the bamboo shaft of the brush between his index and middle fingers above the bandage line. He tested the angle against the dry stone until the tip held steady.
“You need the Balance body notes to help your student Kes redirect breath around his scarred costal vessels,” Seyun said. He looked across the bench at Daro Kesh. “And we need Custodian Halen’s working directive so Pel’s murder and the borrowed fire spirit can’t be buried as a marsh outlaw raid. Neither of those needs one of us to rob the other.”
With the side of his thumb, Seyun flipped his Account Book open to the final twelve pages. The dense, hair-fine transcription he had made by animal fat candlelight beneath the Monastery of the Last Question before climbing up to face Ilyra at dawn. Every curve of Master Uren’s return diagram, every spirit vein junction measurement, and every marginal warning about inward-closing vessels stood recorded there in his precise storehouse hand.
