By the stairwell door, Daro Kesh leaned his left shoulder against the rough granite curve of the dome, watching Ilyra work through the tenth repetition of her revised lateral sweep. Meanwhile, Nara Soth called out corrections from the center of the needle ring.
Nara never used a poetic metaphor when a carpenter’s measurement would do.
When Ilyra’s front knee drifted half an inch inward on the fourth repetition, Nara didn’t speak of cranes or willow branches. She told Ilyra that her left kneecap was pointing at the stairwell instead of her big toe. That a wolf or a spearman would snap her ankle if she landed like that on wet mud. Ilyra tensed her jaw on the eighth turn to brace for shoulder pain that no longer came. Then, Nara told her that clenching her back teeth stiffened the tendons in her neck and slowed her left wrist by a tenth of a heartbeat.
Daro watched the one-armed woman strip away ten years of fancy sect posturing with nothing but a sharp eye and a flat voice. He felt a sudden, sharp ache of recognition in his chest.
Back in the river wards of Oran, before Examiner Vael’s men had come to the Black-Roof School with their seizure warrants and iron bars, Daro had spent four winters teaching the dockworkers’ and boatmen’s children how to hold a wooden practice stick in the narrow yard behind his timber hall.
