Ilyra kept the point of her marsh-iron spear resting half an inch above the overturned baked-clay bowl on the flat stone slabs and looked up into Seyun’s frustrated eyes. “Which duty does this test actually exist to protect, Seyun?” she asked quietly.
Seyun opened his mouth to answer that he was trying to protect all of them—the bowl, the splint. The block line—and stopped before the first syllable left his tongue. The hot, aching wire of Ilyra’s unanswered echo beneath his left collarbone throbbed against his ribs. It held up a mirror to what he had just done.
“Look at what’s inside that puddle on the stones,” Ilyra continued. Her voice carried zero mockery, only the clear, hard-won honesty of a rival who had made the same mistake three exchanges into her duel with the hooked chain the evening before. “Two days ago in the auction courtyard against Bel Sar, you held a shallow woven reed bowl in your hands for thirty breaths. Bel Sar swept your feet on the twenty-eighth count. Then, you planted your left forefoot under the rebound and let him break your fourth toe rather than tip that bowl. Why?”
“Because the reed bowl held two pounds of third-terrace stone ash that we couldn’t replace,” Seyun answered slowly. He looked from the wet flat stone slabs to the southern ward roof fifty paces away. “If I dropped that ash in the mud, Maren and Tov’s inward channels would have squeezed tight in the night without medicine…
