Thirty paces ahead of the creaking pine litters, the mountain trail narrowed to an oblique seam of frost-split granite where the wind came up from the valley floor like a whetstone. Seyun moved in a crouched, three-point rhythm. Lead boot testing the inner wall, right heel sliding carefully to keep the five-inch cut along his outer thigh from pulling against its linen stitch-strips. The six-foot ash measuring pole probing the white shelf two strides ahead.
Every time the pole’s iron metal ring struck buried quartz or dropped through an air pocket in the drift, a sharp shaking ran up the wood into the split skin of his palms. Five days ago, during Daro Kesh’s seventh-dawn echo inside the summit vault, he had held two separate Flame routes open at once to sever Pera’s circuit from the pillar without tearing her nerves.
The effort had split the calluses across both hands along the heart-spirit vein creases, and though Mina had dressed them with boiled linen and animal fat, the freezing night air made the raw seams burn with every impact. Worse, he couldn’t circulate more than a finger’s breadth of Flame warmth to his wrists without the newly opened third mark beneath his chest bone answering the motion with a dull, warning pull.
