Inside the limewashed storeroom, the air still smelled faintly of yesterday’s back-blown woodsmoke and the sharp, earthy bitterness of boiled reed-root. Light fell through the high wooden shutter in a pale grey rectangle across the flat stone slabs where the overturned copper sterilization tray had been scrubbed and set back on its iron trivet. Mina didn’t wait for Seyun to speak. He closed the heavy timber door behind him. Then, shutting out the courtyard, she pointed to the stacked lime sacks beside the cold stove.
“Sit,” Mina said. “And unwrap the left palm so I can see whether standing in the damp wind made the blister edges cry.”
Seyun sat on the coarse sacking and held out his left hand. Meanwhile, Mina loosened the linen tie with quick, practiced fingers. Up close, the difference between his sister and the sect healers at Ash Reed was always startling. Elder Hesh and the pavilion physicians had looked at a student’s body the way a judge looked at a tax roll—searching for whether the total met the needed threshold so they could stamp the book and move on. Mina looked at skin, tendon, and pulse the way a boatwright looked at a hull seam before a winter crossing, indifferent to pride and interested only in where the water would come through.
