For three breaths in the cold dirt lane between the cabbages, nineteen-year-old Kes stood with his head bowed and both hands still wrapped around the handle of his wooden sword. Meanwhile, Daro Kesh held the blade by its middle. Behind him, seventeen-year-old Bren looked down at his boots in guilty silence, and fifteen-year-old Tella bit her lip hard enough to turn it white. When Daro released the wooden blade. Then he stepped back half a pace to take Kes’s right wrist between his calloused thumb and forefinger, the boy flinched. Not as if he feared a blow, which Daro had never given a pupil in his life. But as if having his teacher read the pulse in his wrist were worse than a beating.
“I don’t need to go to the shed, Master Daro,” Tella said in a small, fierce voice, stepping out from her place in the cabbage row and reaching inside the breast pocket of her patched hemp work-coat. She drew out a cheap, eight-page pamphlet printed on coarse yellow straw-paper and stamped across the cover in faded blue ink with the circular sky-slit seal of the country registry. She laid it on the porch rail between Daro and Seyun. “I hid it under the oat-bin for him when we heard your boots in the lane yesterday.”
