The instant Joren’s fever-bright eyes focused on Seyun kneeling above him with two more copper needles glinting between his bandaged fingers, panic convulsed the bedridden student’s frame. For six weeks in this shuttered room, dreaming through sulfur fever and bitter-root stupor, Joren had dreaded the moment his winter fraud would come back to collect its debt.
Seeing the expelled Coal student leaning over his bare chest with needles in hand, Joren’s right hand twitched reflexively toward the bedpost where his practice sword and fancy Bronze token hung. At the same time, his shoulders jerked upward off the blade collar.
“Get back—Elders, get him off—!” Joren croaked, the sudden muscular burst driving his fourth-beat stone flare straight against the seated copper needle below his left collarbone.
Before the jerk could bend the needle shaft inside the muscle, Mina slammed the heel of her free right palm down onto the point of Joren’s uninjured shoulder, pinning him flat to the horsehair blade collar with the no-nonsense leverage of an Oran dockside clinic.
“Hold your collarbone still, you idiot!” Mina snapped directly into Joren’s ear. “There’s a two-inch copper needle seated a hair’s breadth from your subclavian return. If you jerk your shoulder again while my brother is venting that Court filth out of your chest, not even your sect patriarch will keep your right arm from going numb until spring!”
