An hour before sunrise on the fourteenth of the charter month. Meanwhile, the river fog still hung thick and cold between the stave-stacks of the coopers’ ward, Seyun returned to the Old Wrestling Lodge alone. He had left the forty-pound bundle of marsh iron and Master Uren’s tablet locked in the back room of Mina’s apothecary clinic under Ilyra’s watch. At the lodge gate, Mother Renn sat wrapped in a grey wool shawl beside a small charcoal fire bowl, her bronze counting gong resting in its felt case at her feet. She looked at his bare ankles and the fresh, thin linen strips around his palms, nodded once. Then she lifted the iron latch.
Inside the sunken thirty-foot courtyard, the morning air was still and smelled of old river-silt, pine resin, and fifty years of wrestling animal fat rubbed into the timber rails. Seyun untied his straw sandals at the bottom of the stone steps, set them neatly beside the boundary post. Then they stepped onto the cold flat stone slabs in his bare feet.
For eleven years at Ash Reed, because his breath wouldn’t climb the outward ladder of the fire manuals, Seyun had learned to notice what faster, stronger students stepped over without feeling. A boy who carried coal-hods and swept the outer practice yards knew where the frost heaved the bricks in January, which roof-gutter dripped onto the third flat stone slab after a thaw, and how a loose wood slot joint groaned half a second before…
