True to her word on the ridge stair, Ilyra didn’t allow Seyun to set a single boot toward the lower courts until they had spent fifteen minutes inside the hall medicine room behind the middle residence. The senior hall physician—a brisk, grey-braided woman who had treated ages of spear wounds—clucked her tongue furiously. Just then, she peeled back the blood-soaked pad over Ilyra’s right collarbone and saw where Vane’s rear-curving iron barb had ripped through the top two waxed-linen stitches.
Ilyra sat upright on the wooden check stool without leaning back against the wall. She held her jaw set. Meanwhile, the physician washed the torn seam with boiled pine-spirit and drew three fresh, deep stitches through the muscle sheath with a curved bronze needle. Beneath his left collarbone, Seyun felt each bite of the stitch needle as a brief, muted prickle in Place I. Nothing like the hot spike of Vane’s steel hook on the cliff, only the quiet register of a wound being closed.
While Ilyra’s shoulder was being bound in a fresh figure-eight linen harness to keep the shoulder muscle from pulling, the physician caught sight of the charcoal-stained reed-ash wraps on Seyun’s hands and insisted on unwinding them over the stone basin. She studied the dark red, healing burn-ridges across both of his palms and the neat, scabbed sword-nick along his ribs from the Oran contest.
