While Osen Tal sagged silent against the granite wall by the stair door, Seyun crouched down again two paces from the outer needle ring. He took a strip of clean linen from his coat pocket. He didn’t reach across the needles—crossing the outer thirty-two shafts with his hand would disturb the air channels—but he looked closely at the dark red stain on the back of Nara Soth’s quilted gray coat.
“The bleeding at your sixth dorsal node has already clotted,” Seyun observed quietly, noting how the steam rising from the torn wool had ceased and how her pulse along the side of her neck beat at a slow, rock-steady forty counts to the minute despite the sub-zero draft. “A normal fighter’s blood would still be running down the waistband after a puncture that deep in the cold.”
“Don’t look at it like a village boy staring at a temple miracle, physician’s brother,” Nara Soth said dryly, shifting her chin a fraction so the starlight fell across her weathered cheek. “If you’re going to work on a fifth-realm harness tonight, you had better clear any fairy stories about Crown longevity out of your head first.”
Beside Seyun, Daro Kesh folded his arms across his chest, his hand staying near his handle. “In the river towns, the storytellers say a fighter who reaches Crown steps outside the mortal calendar altogether,” Daro said. “Looking at your hair and that empty left sleeve, I’m guessing the storytellers never climbed this mountain.”
