Seyun looked down at the cream-colored linen charter resting on the stone corner of the eleventh bed.
He didn’t right away push it away with a grand speech.
Anyone who had grown up in a wealthy hall with full storerooms could afford to sneer at a bribe in a single breath. Someone who had spent his whole life counting copper coins and scraping the bottom of clay medicine jars knew exactly how heavy that sheet of linen was.
Seyun stood three paces from the warm bronze pillar. He looked across the narrow aisle at his sister.
Mina had been awake for twenty-six hours straight.
There were dark hollows of tiredness under her clear eyes. The hem of her wool coat was stiff with frozen river mud from the gorge trail. And around both of her wrists, hidden just beneath her frayed linen cuffs, lay the cold, constricting gray bands of Magistrate Korr’s fourteen-day Jade spirit vein ban. A punishment she had taken two weeks ago simply for refusing to let a boatman’s child choke to death behind a tax barrier.
For three winters in Ash Reed, and through every week of their flight north along the river locks, Seyun had watched Mina measure dried willow-bark and second-grade reed-ash by the half-spoonful over a smoky animal fat lamp, dividing a single packet of fever powder into four paper twists. That was because they never knew. Just then, the Court’s court guards would close the next town’s apothecary stall.
