The two enforcement guards halted half a stride from Bed Two, blinking in surprise at the nineteen-year-old apprentice healer standing in their path with an uncultivated four-inch razor-sharp razor knife held level at the height of their brigandine throat-latches.
Behind Mina, Pera stood with the heavy wooden kettle-prop club gripped in both scarred hands. Her feet planted was wide in her sheepskin boots. On Bed One, sixteen-year-old Halin had swung one thin leg over his iron rail as if he meant to throw his own wired body onto the guards’ backs if they touched the healer.
“Take one more step toward my patient with that wire,” Mina said, her voice fully empty of tremor as she looked past the guards’ iron helmets straight at Assistant Examiner Reth Mal, “and you’ll have to cut down an Oran guild healer to reach her bed. And if you force a silver guide-rod back into her fifth rib gap now that her internal return circuit has closed along her lower-back vein, the sudden crash between the pillar’s baseline and her closed vessel will stop her heart within ten breaths.”
Reth Mal didn’t even glance at Pera’s ribs. He drew his silver-mounted Jade sword fully from its sword sheath, the flat of the blade ringing with a cold, high trial tone.
