The stone stairway from the refugee apron climbed two hundred feet up a natural chimney in the limestone cliff, emerging onto the middle tier of White Heron Hall where the mountain gale blew with clear force through the notched eastern castle walls. Here the sect’s main martial yards were laid out in three stepped terraces of dressed grey granite. It was bordered on the north by long, low-eaved armory sheds and stone water troughs fed by an ice-rimmed aqueduct. In warmer seasons, the middle terraces rang from dawn to dusk with the steady beat of three hundred iron-shod shafts striking granite flags.
Today, only two dozen foundation pupils were drilling in the center of the yard, leaning forty degrees into the freezing cross-wind as they practiced low, ground-hugging thrust shifts. More striking to Seyun was where the Hall’s senior teachers sat. Instead of observing the drills from the glass-shuttered warming pavilion at the head of the terrace, four grey-templed Bronze instructors sat outdoors on overturned oak nail-kegs beside the armory grinding troughs. A small charcoal forge-pot hissed between their boots. Their heavy leather aprons were crusted with wet iron scale and ash-wood shavings.
Seyun stopped near the corner of the first trough. He watched the nearest teacher—a broad-backed man in his fifties with an old hook-scar across his cheekbone—heat a cracked iron spear metal ring in the coals with a pair of short tongs. In any well-supplied chartered house, a split metal ring or a splintered ash shaft was tossed…
