Once Daro Kesh and Ilyra took the grey pack-mule and Mother Renn’s reed baskets out to the side barn to inspect the harness and cart-axle, Mina cleared the south end of the pine table. She set a basin of boiled well-water steaming on the wood. Then she pointed a relentless forefinger at the low bench beside the window.
“Sit, Seyun,” Mina ordered. She tied a clean white linen apron over her wool dress and laying out her bone-handled tweezers, her flat horn spatula, and three heavy clay jars of greenish-black reed-ash and rendered mutton-animal fat paste. “And take off your coat and shirt down to the waist. If you think I hiked twelve miles up a frozen timber track just to look at the outside of your sleeve-wraps, you have forgotten who stitched your knee when you fell off the weir at ten.”
Seyun obeyed without a word, sitting on the pine bench and letting Tella help him slip his arms out of his patched hemp coat and undershirt before Tella discreetly stepped out to the porch to give brother and sister the room. Mina possessed no training realm of her own—her channels were the ordinary. Even so, unlit vessels of a town herbalist—her fingers had been trained since childhood in the river clinic to read heat, swelling, tendon creep, and under-skin blood-frozen stillness with a care that shamed half the sect apothecaries in the basin.
