The final word of Daro Kesh’s challenge had barely left his lips. Just then, the air between the pine workbench and the casement window seemed to tighten like a wet bowstring dried suddenly before a forge.
Unlike the dawn on the river abbey terrace ten days earlier, when Seyun had still been trapped at the ninth level of Breath and his whole body had been cold with morning fog, his channels today were already kindled with the first-day heat of Flame—and raw from wrist to collarbone after venting his entire basin against the falling cedar crossbeam the afternoon before.
When the second vow locked into place, it didn’t arrive with a cool trickle.
It struck the occluded subclavian gate beneath Seyun’s right collarbone like a white-hot iron chisel driven straight through an unmortared brick wall.
Seyun’s breath stopped in his throat. He didn’t cry out, and his heels didn’t shift a fraction of an inch from the pine floorboards, yet every muscle across his upper back and shoulders locked rigid as the sealed right-hand branch of the Answering Spirit vein—a vessel that had lain dormant and narrow as a dried reed-stem since his birth—was wrenched open from the inside by the load-bearing weight of a consolidated Bronze swordmaster’s spoken opposition.
