“Four of Balance’s five inner elders held a living Jade bond with my spirit veins that winter,” Nara Soth said from the center of the iron ring, her dark eyes steady in the cold starlight dropping through the broken dome. “Elder Vorn held the first chair, Elder Marok held the second, Kael’s grandson Soren held the third, and old Elder Tavel held the fourth. Only young Uren in the fifth seat had refused to take a coerced mark from me.”
Seyun sat on the third bronze tread of the spiral stair. He turned to a clean leaf of his Account Book, his charcoal poised as he listened to the mechanics of what came next.
“Under Sel Oran’s original law,” Seyun said, recalling the fourth column of the broken stone tablet, “a living Answering Spirit vein bond can’t be dissolved by a clerk’s letter or a one-sided refusal. It can only be broken before death if one partner demands a witnessed final contest in the open courtyard and defeats the other until the mark’s return loop is cut by mutual or forced concession.”
“And what happens to the spirit veins of both partners when a living bond is broken in a witnessed final contest?” Nara asked him from the stone bed, testing whether he had read the bottom of the tablet.
