Mina spread the cool, pale-grey paste of inner-spring reed ash across the pink scalded crescents of Seyun’s palms with a flat bone spatula. Instantly a clean, piercing coolness sank through the raw outer skin into the small spirit vein branches at the base of his thumbs, easing the tight, drawing ache that had stayed since the storeroom chimney collapsed. Mina began winding the fresh linen strips over the ash paste in taut. Then, overlapping figure-eights, Seyun kept his eyes on Ilyra.
At the funerary abbey ten days ago, when they had spoken their rival vows at dawn and the silver curve of Place I had burned itself beneath his left collarbone, he had told her that Master Uren’s art needed a worthy opponent whose path tested his own. In the reed marsh and at the village burial house, she had seen him cross from Coal into Flame seven days after her own consolidation of Bronze. Yet she had come close to asking the exact clockwork rules carved into the lower half of Uren’s stone. Each time, he had changed the subject to Halen’s ledgers or the fire wagon.
Now, with the cool sting of her three silver pieces of remittance ash on his palms, sitting in silence felt like another ferry-landing trick.
