Dawn broke over Ash Reed Sect in a band of hard, pewter-colored light that turned the rime on the gatehouse tiles to dull silver. Down in the outer entrance court—thirty paces from the stone threshold where Elder Hesh had once dismissed Seyun from the sect roster—two junior stewards stood blowing on their gloved fingers beside a pair of iron-bound cedar chests. Between them stood Senior Elder Tor Ves. They were wrapped in a heavy badger-trimmed mantle with his hands tucked into his wide sleeves.
The senior elder’s face looked greyer than it had three days ago. Just then, he presided over the thirty-breath healing ash bowl challenge. The near-disaster in the stone spring courtyard. There, the Aperture Court rider’s bronze deep ring chime had driven the sect’s underground guardian into a scalding frenzy that cracked the bathhouse foundations, had stripped away much of Tor’s pomposity. Yet his small, calculating eyes still darted constantly toward the mountain road, weighing every syllable spoken within earshot of the gate.
Mina knelt in the frost beside the first cedar chest, flipping back the iron hasps to inspect the inside before anyone touched the carrying poles. Inside, packed in dry oat chaff to prevent dampness from clumping the powder, sat twelve sealed heavy clay jars of refined winter spring ash, along with forty rolls of boiled linen bandage and four tins of pine-pitch salve.
