Dusk settled over Ash Reed Mountain in a quiet blanket of indigo shadow and woodsmoke as the visiting town apothecaries and Oran guild tax clerks left down the lantern-lit mountain road, their cart beds loaded with the leftover auction lots and their notebooks filled with Elder Hesh’s pulse diagnostics and the signed witness statements from the spring basin eruption. By the first watch of the sixth night, the outer courtyard had grown peaceful. Two masons from the lower village were already setting timber wooden props under the cracked basin coping, while inside the protected southern treatment rooms, coal fire bowls glowed softly behind closed cedar shutters.
Inside the ward room, Mina, Pera, and Mother Renn worked in unrushed harmony around the five occupied cots. Now that they possessed four full pounds of unblended third-terrace reed ash—two pounds won by Seyun’s thirty-breath bowl challenge and two pounds donated from Elder Hesh’s personal reserve—Mina didn’t have to ration the healing wraps by the pinch. She mixed thick, steaming pastes of stone ash, crushed willow bark, and animal fat in a wide clay pot basin, packing the grey warmth across the scarred between-rib channels of Maren, Tov, and Vey, and applying a fresh drawing layer over Joren’s chest bone where the Court locator had ripped the last fire root free.
