Seyun stepped out onto the front porch. Just then, his younger sister Mina came through the lower garden gate with her heavy cedar medicine chest strapped across her back and the lead-rope of a stout grey pack-mule looped around her mittened fist. Two paces behind her walked Mother Renn, the grey-haired herb-dryer from Oran’s lower river ward. She was wrapped in a thick homespun shawl and carrying two woven reed baskets lashed with oiled canvas.
“Mina!” Seyun called out, taking the three porch steps in a single stride before stopping himself from reaching out with his linen-wrapped hands. Nineteen-year-old Mina took one look at the double bandages around her brother’s palms, the singed hem of his hemp coat. The dark circles under his eyes, and her mouth pressed into the exact stern healer’s line that every barge-hauler in Oran feared more than a tax collector.
“Don’t even tell me you kept your hands dry, Seyun,” Mina said. She handed the mule’s lead-rope to seventeen-year-old Bren. Meanwhile, her sharp brown eyes swept from her brother’s wrists up to his collarbones. “I could smell scorched linen and strained chest-channels from the bottom of the alder path. Sit down on that bench inside before I take a willow switch to your shins.”
