Through the late afternoon, while nineteen-year-old Kes rested on the porch bench with a warm comfrey-and-willow healing wrap strapped across his right ribs to calm the surface inflammation before tomorrow’s live test, Daro Kesh and Seyun walked the narrow dirt lane beside the cabbage beds to work out the physical footwork of the new interruption drill. Seyun couldn’t grip a wooden practice sword with his braced palms. Because of that, he tucked a light yard-stick of peeled alder into the crook of his left elbow and used his forearm and shoulder posture to mark the student’s angles. Meanwhile, Daro stepped through the teacher’s advance with his sheathed Bronze blade.
Watching the two of them work together in the quiet winter light—adjusting heel distances by half-inches, testing whether a left-hip pivot crushed the turnip greens, and checking the breath-counts against Kes’s resting pulse—an outsider might have assumed that the dispute they had sworn beneath Seyun’s right collarbone in Oran had softened into cozy agreement. After all, they had fought Commander Keth Or on the same stairs at White Heron Hall, climbed the same four-hundred-foot gorge wall before dawn. Then they spent the afternoon co-designing a sword exercise at the same pine table.
