“When I walked into Sel Oran’s courtyard with willow bark holding my boots together,” Nara Soth said, her voice steady against the four-count hum of the bronze pillar, “forty of his senior students tried to throw me back down the steps before I muddied the flat stone slabs.”
He sat on the third bronze tread with his Account Book open on his knee. Seyun kept his charcoal moving across the page. Meanwhile, Ilyra and Daro listened from the frost-rimed crescent above.
“Sel Oran came out of the main hall with stone dust on his sleeves, told his senior steward to bring me a bowl of hot mutton broth and a pair of dry socks first, and waited until I had eaten two bowls before he stepped into the yard,” Nara continued. “He didn’t ask what sect licensed my blade. He didn’t ask who my father was. He just planted his feet in the Arch-Stone Bearing and told me to hit him wherever I saw a lie.”
“How did a nineteen-year-old in the Bronze realm break a late-Jade founder’s stance?” Daro Kesh asked, leaning slightly forward as his swordsman’s mind tried to picture the shape of that courtyard three hundred years ago.
