Seyun stepped carefully past Daro Kesh and Hall Mistress Soran to the front of the file, placing his boots just beyond the three-inch score line the ceiling downdraft had cut into the thirty-fourth station. Behind him, Mina, Ilyra, Soran, Daro, Osen, Venn, and Tarn waited in single file along the narrow uncarved border of the slate.
Before moving his feet a single inch forward, Seyun closed his eyes for two breaths and damped down every trace of circulating breath inside his spirit veins. He let the warm, responsive current of his Early Bronze Answering Edge sink back into the quiet pool below his navel. He let the crisp silver-blue tension at his left collarbone and the dark iron weight at his right collarbone go fully dormant. Even the one-fifth breath reserve he had learned to hold in his chest muscle yesterday had to be held strictly as ordinary, uncultivated lung air, moved by muscle and rib stretch alone.
The physical cost was immediate. Without even a trickle of Bronze warmth circulating through his lower hands and feet, the sub-zero mountain wind bit straight through his boot leather into his cracked fifth metatarsal. The dull ache inside the cedar splint sharpened into a bright, cold toothache in the bone. The scarred knuckles of his left hand stiffened inside his bloodstained wool glove.
