“I adjusted the fourth drainage valve,” Mina said clearly from beside the second bed. She kept her hand resting openly on her canvas medicine satchel so the late-Jade judge could see she held neither blade nor array-pin. “And my brother mapped the four-loop set before we touched the brass.”
Chief Examiner Vaska Ren paused three paces inside the closed oak doors, his dark, unrushed eyes moving from Seyun in the center aisle to Mina beside Pera’s bed. Then to Ilyra and Daro Kesh flanking the threshold to his left and right.
He stood fully within the reach of both Ilyra’s ash spear and Daro’s Black-Roof broadsword.
Yet there was no stiffness in his shoulders, no defensive flare of Jade qi around his wool coat, and no try to back toward the iron latch of the door.
“You left your twelve array-spearmen thirty paces outside in the snow,” Daro Kesh said from the right-hand wall, his hand still resting on his iron handle knob, his voice low and flat. “Either you think three Returning Step martial artists can’t cut you down before your captain crosses the porch. Or you walked in bare-handed so our own law would forbid us from striking first.”
