At the first grey thinning of the eastern sky on the seventh dawn after the snow bridge, Seyun woke on his corner pallet without needing Mina’s hand on his shoulder. Three hours of deep, dreamless sleep had cleared the fatigue from his calves and shoulders. Meanwhile, the fresh third-terrace reed-ash dressing inside his linen foot-wrap kept the fractured fourth toe of his left foot cool and quiet. He drank half a bowl of warm barley water, slid his three copper needles into his right wristband, picked up a four-foot ash training staff from the outer rack. Then he walked up the stone path toward the oldest enclosure on the mountain.
Tucked behind the lower herb-room sheds and bordered by low, moss-chinked granite walls, the Oldest Foundation Practice Yard was rarely visited by auction guests or inner-court elders. Its flat stone slabs were smaller and darker than the dressed limestone of the main plaza, worn into shallow, overlapping hollows by ages of eight- and ten-year-old initiates repeating the twelve basic stances. Along the eastern wall stood a row of weathered cedar striking posts, their wood scarred at waist height by thousands of clumsy wooden sword-strokes.
Seyun stepped through the unbarred stone archway on his sound right boot and his braced left heel, stopping in the exact square of flat stone slabs near the rear corner where he had stood for eleven years. Even in the grey pre-sunrise chill, his boots knew the shape of this floor better than any room on…
