By midnight the apothecary shop was fully dark save for the small night-wick floating in a dish of rapeseed oil on the high shelf above the herb jars. In the narrow cot behind the bamboo screen at the back of the check room, Mina was asleep at last, her breathing deep and even after thirty-six hours of tending fractures, stitching rib cuts, and boiling burn decoctions. Upstairs in the herbalist’s spare garret, Ilyra and Kes were resting before the morning walk to the civic center.
Seyun lay flat on his back on the low straw pallet beside the check table, a thin cotton sheet drawn up to his waist and both white-bandaged hands resting palm-up on top of the blanket so nothing pressed against the raw blisters.
He wasn’t asleep.
Beneath the coarse linen of his shirt, the two silver marks—Ilyra’s slender curve beneath his left collarbone and Daro Kesh’s broader arc beneath his right—pulsed in a quiet, alternating rhythm that matched the slow rise and fall of his ribs. Thanks to that two-sided symmetry, the feverish heat that should have accompanied second-degree burns across both palms had already pulled back into a clean, manageable throb. His newly kindled Flame breath flow moved through his dorsal and belly vessels as smoothly as deep well-water.
