For two breaths the three young fighters stood frozen beside the stone well-curb, their eyes darting from the blood-stained bandage on Ilyra’s White Heron shoulder cape, to Osen Tal’s bound wrists on the porch step, and finally to the broad, soot-streaked figure of their teacher standing beside the reversed signboard. Then the nineteen-year-old youth in the lead set the full bucket of draw-water down on the flat well-stone without spilling a drop, lowered his guard. Then he hurried up the narrow dirt lane between the turnip beds with the other two close behind him.
“Master Daro!” the nineteen-year-old called out, stopping two paces below the porch steps to bow with the crisp, heels-together courtesy of an active school. Not the slouched nod of a dismissed apprentice. He was lean and wide-shouldered from quarry work, with a crooked nose that had been set slightly off-center years ago and dark, attentive eyes. “We saw the smoke-bright light over the northern ridge before dawn and heard the river-men saying White Heron’s great bell had cracked in the night. When you didn’t come back by the noon ferry, Tella thought the town court guards had locked you in the guildhouse cellar.”
“The court guards in Oran have better things to do than feed me for free, Kes,” Daro Kesh said, though the gruffness he tried to put into his voice fell fully flat against the way his hand reached out to steady the boy’s shoulder as Kes climbed the steps. Daro looked past Kes…
