For two months on the road—sleeping under wet temple roof edges, marching behind punitive grain wagons, and climbing icy switchbacks—whenever Seyun had pictured Joren of Ash Reed, the image in his mind had been simple and sharp. He had remembered Joren as the smiling beneficiary of everything corrupt in the sect. The favored inner-court prodigy in clean blue silk who stood on the winter dais basking in the patrons’ applause. Meanwhile, Senior Elder Tor Ves threw Seyun into the rain and taken away Mina’s herb money.
Now, Seyun sat three feet away on the reed mat. Meanwhile, he dried his three copper needles on a clean linen square. He looked at the actual person on the blade collar. With the borrowed Bronze glow gone and his collar open over pale, blistered skin, nineteen-year-old Joren didn’t look like a grand villain or an untouchable aristocrat.
He looked like a frightened nineteen-year-old orchard farmer’s son whose hands were slightly too small for the heavy sword hanging on his bedpost.
“You reached Flame,” Joren said after a long silence, his voice hoarse from six weeks of sulfur coughing as his eyes rested on the warm, controlled steadiness of Seyun’s wrists. “When you held those three needles over my chest just now, I felt two separate lines of Flame breath running through the copper at once. Not even Elder Hesh can split a Flame thread without scorching the skin.”
