Dusk was settling blue and sharp over the bamboo drying racks when Senior Elder Tor Ves stepped onto the porch of the garden sick room. He was flanked by two inner-court stewards wearing bronze-hilted short sabers. Unlike Elder Hesh, whose guilt had hollowed his cheeks and stained his cuffs, Tor Ves looked every inch the prosperous sect administrator prepared for an annual charter audit.
His silver-streaked beard was neatly combed and oiled. His heavy slate-blue brocade robe was spotless. And his consolidated mature Bronze training settled over the narrow wooden porch like a heavy stone lid placed over a boiling pot. He didn’t step inside the sickroom where Joren lay sleeping in his first unblistered rest in six weeks.
Instead, Tor Ves halted beside the copper drainage basin on the porch, used the iron metal ring of his elder’s staff to lift the corner of the discarded linen cloth stained with rust-colored sulfur sweat. Then he let it drop back into the bucket.
With a single glance at the sulfur residue and at the quiet, even rise of Joren’s blanket through the open screen, Tor Ves understood that the expelled Coal student and his nineteen-year-old sister had accomplished in forty minutes what Ash Reed’s inner sick room had failed to do in forty days. He offered neither a word of thanks for saving his favored student’s heart nor a syllable of apology for the winter check.
