They waited until dusk settled over the lowland village before hitching the caravan mules for the night march toward the upper road. All through the midday hours, Seyun worked on the burial house ladder one final time, brushing dry lime-sand into the joints along the porch roof edges and resetting two cracked gutter tiles over the washhouse to make sure the roof he had pledged to repair for Pel’s widow Marta wouldn’t leak when the next river squall blew in. Mother Renn arrived with her mule cart shortly after noon, paid Marta the first silver advance on the herbal delivery, and listened without a wasted word as Mina told her of the hundred-breath wager set for the Old Wrestling Lodge.
Before coming down from the roof, Seyun sat for twenty minutes by the north chimney stack with his bandaged hands resting on his knees. He watched the afternoon carts roll up the muddy ribbon of the Oran post-road. From thirty feet above the courtyard, the village looked small and vulnerably plain. Stacked peat bricks drying by the forge shop, Marta’s eight-year-old son carrying a bucket of well water for his mother. The long canvas-draped shape of the central wagon where the young fire spirit breathed in slow, cooled intervals after five days of copper-needle venting. Every time the Court’s great machinery moved in the high valleys, it left its weight on roofs like this one.
