The outer herb garden of Ash Reed Sect smelled exactly as it had every winter morning of Seyun’s youth. Steamed earth-heat silt rising from the lower terracotta chimney pipes, bitter angelica stalks drying on slatted bamboo trays, and the sharp resin of pine smoke from the simmering sheds. His boots knew the path so intimately that before his eyes even looked down at the frost-covered gravel, his left foot automatically lengthened its stride by four inches to step over the sunken flat stone slab beside the third drainage trough. A stone that had rocked on its mortar bed since his fourteenth year.
Beside the seventh row of bamboo drying racks, half-screened from the busy auction courtyard by a hedge of clipped winter boxwood, stood Elder Hesh. For eleven winters, Hesh had been the foundation teacher who stood at the front of the outer lecture court with an ivory pointer, grading Seyun’s twelve forms as technically flawless while sighing over the ‘timid, inward-closing constitution’ that kept the boy trapped at Coal.
On the afternoon of Seyun’s expulsion, it had been Hesh who hurried down to the outer gatehouse in the rain and pressed Seyun’s three copper needles back into his palm with shaking hands.
