In the stone-paved outer courtyard of Ash Reed Sect, the afternoon wind swept dry snow dust across the empty auction stone base where Seyun had stood for thirty breaths holding a bowl of spring ash against Bel Sar’s staff. Now a low frame stand table had been dragged into the lee of the eastern wall. Upon it lay an inkstone, a brass water-dropper crusted with ice around its spout, and six long strips of oiled courier parchment bearing the crane-and-reed watermark of White Heron Hall.
Ilyra stood over the table with her wool cloak pinned back from her sword arm, her brush moving in the crisp, upright characters taught to senior hall students. Beside the stone well-curb ten paces away, Daro Kesh sat on a cedar block with the shortened stub of his broken Bronze sword braced across a folded canvas knee-cloth. Assistant Examiner Reth Mal’s Jade strike at the Hollow Summit had snapped the upper third of the dark blade away. That left a jagged, square-tipped weapon barely longer than a butcher’s cleaver. With slow, careful strokes of a flat gray whetstone, Daro was beveling the fractured tip into an usable chisel edge.
“Two squads from the lower ferry hostel, four senior spear students from the willow dyke post, and Teacher Marv’s patrol if they cleared the eastern tollgate before the snow closed it,” Ilyra recited aloud as Seyun and Mina emerged from the herb shed lane. She didn’t look up from her fourth parchment slip, her voice carrying…
