Shortly after midnight, as the winter star-patterns wheeled above the dark shape of the third-terrace pine ridge, the soft crunch of boots on frost-hardened gravel sounded at the end of the yew walk. Ilyra and Daro Kesh stepped out from the shadow of the ward porch, both wrapped in heavy wool cloaks over their armor. Ilyra had a fresh, clean linen sling supporting her right forearm. Just then, she wasn’t holding her spear so the torn stitch across her shoulder blade could rest without tension. Daro carried a plain six-foot wooden training staff he had pulled from the outer rack.
Neither of them interrupted Seyun until he finished modifying the shifts of the Seventh through Twelfth base forms. In the Seventh Form (Drawing the Sluice)—the exact outward-bellows shift where Elder Hesh had misdiagnosed his inward rebound for eleven years—Seyun no longer tried to pump his breath outward from the chest bone while lunging onto his left toes. Instead, turning on his left heel and anchoring his stance on his sound right leg, he let the movement draw inward through his three chest marks first. That turned the seventh form from a solitary outward push into a compact receiving frame.
“If Elder Hesh’s junior assistants saw that heel-turn at a seasonal grading, they would deduct three marks for a dropped lead shoulder and an incomplete lunge,” Ilyra remarked quietly from the edge of the walk, though her eyes held the keen appreciation of a fellow craftsperson examining a sound joint. “Your…
