Dawn of the eighth day—the second of seven dawns on Daro Kesh’s deeper Bronze echo—broke crisp and windless over the valley, leaving only three nights before the registration ward-lamps of the Hollow Summit would go dark. Out in the cabbage lane behind the schoolhouse, Seyun spent the first hour of daylight practicing Returning Step footwork with his braced hands tucked securely inside the breast of his wool vest so he couldn’t be tempted to use his arms for balance.
With his palms locked still by Mina’s cedar boards, every turn, pivot, and weight-transfer had to originate cleanly from his ankles, knees, and hips, guided by the cool axial poise of Ilyra’s Bronze mark in his left collarbone and the broad, grounded balance of Daro’s mark in his right. Meanwhile, on the porch, Mina examined nineteen-year-old Kes’s right third rib, nodded in satisfaction at how the boy’s new fifth-rib breathing route had taken all the heat off the old pleurisy scar. Then she gave him a fresh jar of reed-ash salve to keep the between-rib tissue supple.
The morning meal of hot barley porridge and salted turnip greens was cleared from the pine table. Then, the six of them—Seyun, Ilyra, Daro, Mina, Mother Renn, and a closely watched Osen Tal—gathered around the box-shaped chalkboard slate to rebuild the Hollow Summit operation from the ground up. Instead of a martial raid plan built on breaking through guards, Seyun drew a timeline built strictly around attention, timing, and assistance.
