The winter dusk settled quickly over the red clay hills north of Oran. That turned the frosted rows of cabbages and turnips a deep twilight blue while seventeen-year-old Bren lit the two iron animal fat-lanterns hanging from the porch rafters. Down by the stone well-house, nineteen-year-old Kes was washing the gravel dust from his teacher’s scraped knuckles with a dipper of cold draw-water while fifteen-year-old Tella gathered up the wooden practice sticks and hung them back on their notched pegs by height.
In the western corner of the porch, Senior Steward Osen Tal had not touched the second mug of hot barley water Tella had set beside his cedar bucket an hour ago. For the entire afternoon, the fifty-year-old administrator had sat with his bound wrists resting on his knees and his ankles hobbled by Daro’s hemp cord. He watched every step of the set in the yard: a nineteen-year-old quarryman’s son refusing his teacher’s classic high gate. The boy challenging a veteran Bronze swordmaster to come at him at full speed. The swordmaster bowing publicly to his pupil and admitting three years of wrong grading. The live two-on-one trial with Ilyra’s spear. And finally Seyun openly logging the seven-dawn echo in his book without hiding a single word.
