Blood warmed the linen binding under Seyun’s coat as the sixth drop of red water fell from the glass nozzle, sticking the torn cotton of his undershirt to the skin over his left ribs with every spreading of his lungs. He didn’t look down at the cut, and he didn’t spare a fraction of his breath to seal the tiny blood vessel bleeding. Every thread of his newly kindled Flame breath flow was needed in the outer bone of his forearm bones and the small, dense tendons of his wrists.
“Six,” the tally clerk called, the boxwood knife clicking against the sixth notch.
Daro Kesh didn’t press the wound on Seyun’s left side. A street brawler or an ambitious sect duelist would have hunted the bleeding ribs to force a submission, forgetting why the gong had been struck. Daro’s grey eyes remained fixed on the brass lantern-cage hanging behind Seyun’s spine. He stepped left onto the dry eastern flat stone slabs, angling his iron-mounted blade high so the cutting plane sloped directly down toward the top hasp of the cage.
Seyun shifted his weight through the Returning Step, his knees flexing to absorb the sudden lateral change as he raised both crossed wrists to meet the dropping fuller. He didn’t block the blade dead—doing so against consolidated Bronze weight would have snapped both forearm bones like dry pine twigs. Instead, he caught the flat on the heel of his right palm. Then he slid his left hand along the back…
