The woman sitting on an overturned stone grain-mortar in the outer gallery looked to be in her mid-fifties. Even so, the deep weather-creases around her eyes and the gray-brown calluses along her thumbs belonged to someone who had hauled wicker loads over mountain passes for forty winters. Her cloak was stitched from three different weights of waxed hemp, patched at the elbows with deer hide. Her tall basket gave off a pungent, clean smell of dried river-reed pith, bitter wormwood, and coarse pine-resin incense.
When Seyun and Ilyra stepped through the inner arch—still keeping three paces of wary lateral clearance between Seyun’s ribs and Ilyra’s spear shaft—the older woman didn’t flinch at the bare marsh-iron point or rise to bow to White Heron Hall’s silver heron clasp. She merely tucked a stray corner of oilcloth over her top tray of incense cones and looked from one to the other.
“People on the burial road call me Mother Renn,” she said. She set a short brass tally-stick across her knee. “I sell hearth-incense to wagon drivers and bitter-ash to anyone with sense enough to boil their winter water. I’ve been sitting under this leaky arch since the last watch of the night, which means I heard your little truce bargain before you went down the hole, boy. I heard every word of your speeches just now because stone vaults carry like a bronze bell.”
Ilyra inclined her head with the formal courtesy White Heron Hall needed toward civilian tradespeople. “Then you know we agreed to submit immediate custody of a disputed item to an independent witness at dawn. If you’re traveling toward Oran, Mother Renn, we need an impartial observer to witness and certify the terms of a three-exchange martial test. I have copper travel tokens to compensate your time.”
Mother Renn snorted softly, a sound like dry reeds rubbing together in a ditch. “Keep your hall tokens, girl. Copper doesn’t stop the east wind from driving sleet through that collapsed doorway onto my back. If I walk into Oran carrying a judge’s witness fee from a White Heron student, every toll-court guard between here and the ferry will ask whose side I was paid to remember.”
She pointed her brass tally-stick toward the outer entrance of the gallery. Half of the heavy oak door-top door beam had slipped from its weathered limestone ledge-stone during some past winter freeze, canting downward at a steep angle and wedging a pile of wet roof tiles into the threshold so that every gust funneled cold spray straight across the gallery floor.
“You want an independent pair of eyes who owes neither Ash Reed nor White Heron a copper,” Renn said, “there’s my fee. Reset that oak beam square onto its stone pins and clear the drainage doorstep so a traveler can boil tea here next month without sitting in a puddle. Do that without dropping the arch on my basket. I’ll watch your three passes and mark down who stood and who fell.”
Ilyra glanced at the fallen oak top door beam—a water-soaked timber eight feet long and thick as a smith’s anvil block—and then at her own bandaged left shoulder. Lifting dead weight with a torn shoulder muscle before a spear exchange was an obvious disadvantage. But refusing a civilian’s practical condition would violate her hall’s code of road service.
“Agreed,” Ilyra said, grounding her spear upright against an intact column.
“Agreed,” Seyun said at the same moment.
They worked together for twenty minutes in the pale morning light without wasting breath on commentary. Here, as in the cramped shrine courtyard the evening before, their bodies understood tasks that their allegiances complicated.
Seyun examined the limestone ledge-stone first, brushing away wet moss and rotted mortar with the side of his thumb until he found the two original iron dowel sockets cut by the abbey’s masons hundreds of years earlier. The stone shelf on the northern door post had spalled along its outer lip. If they simply heaved the oak beam straight up, the corner would crumble and drop the timber back into the mud.
“The north socket needs a stone wedge under the heel before we take the weight,” Seyun said, selecting two flat slate thin wedges from the rubble heap and testing their grain with a tap of a cobble. “And your left shoulder shouldn’t take the lift. Brace the low end with a lever pole using your right side while I walk the north end up the step-stones.”
Ilyra looked at the spalled limestone lip, saw right away that his reading of the load path was sound, and didn’t argue out of pride. She picked up a fallen cedar rafter as a pry-bar, seated its tip beneath the southern wood slot of the top door beam. Then she leaned her uninjured right hip and Late Flame core weight onto the lever.
“Ready on the south pin,” she said.
Seyun crouched under the heavier northern end of the waterlogged oak, fitting the rough wood into the hollow of his right shoulder while keeping his chest upright so Uren’s stone tablet and his Account Book wouldn’t crush against his ribs. Drawing a deep, slow Coal breath through the sixth Ash Reed base stance—Stone Pier Bearing the Sluice—he drove upward through his heels. His calves and lower back burned with the honest, familiar strain of physical labor, tendons standing out like cordage along his neck as the heavy beam rose inch by inch.
The wood slot cleared the iron dowel by a thumb’s breadth. Then, Seyun slid the two slate thin wedges into the spalled gap with his left hand and nodded. Ilyra eased her cedar lever down in perfect exact timing. The oak top door beam settled onto its limestone pins with a solid, deadened thud that sent no cracks into the upper stonework. Together they kicked the broken roof tiles out of the threshold gutter until the trapped rainwater drained cleanly down the outside slope.
Mother Renn watched the entire repair from her upturned mortar without offering a word of help. Her sharp dark eyes tracked how Seyun favored his inner chest pocket and how Ilyra protected her left shoulder wrap without losing leverage.
Seyun wiped wet limestone grit from his palms onto the hem of his gray robe. He stepped back into the cleared center of the outer gallery. The reset top door beam cut off the worst of the wind at once. That left a twenty-foot rectangle of damp, relatively level flat stone slabs between the columns.
Mother Renn tapped her brass tally-stick once against the rim of the stone mortar. “The beam sits square,” she declared. “Now state your terms clearly enough that an old woman doesn’t have to guess what you think you’re fighting over.”
While Mother Renn crouched beside her small iron travel-fire bowl in the corner of the gallery, blowing a twist of dry birch bark into a tiny, smokeless coal to warm her fingers, Seyun took three slow steps along the cleared limestone floor to test how the stone took a boot sole.
The flat stone slabs here had been laid by the same granite masons who built the underground vault below. Even so, decades of wind-driven sleet had etched shallow slanted channels across the grain. Near the inner arch, the stone was bone-dry and offered solid friction. Four paces out toward the row of stone pillars, where roof spray had blown in before they reset the oak top door beam, a thin glazed film of green winter lichen made the surface dangerous for any wide lunge.
Across the court, Ilyra was doing the exact same check. Without appearing to hurry, she walked the twenty-foot length of the gallery once. That let the iron butt-metal ring of her spear tap lightly against every third flat stone slab to listen for hollow mortar beds or rocking slabs.
Seyun watched her. He felt a quiet, skilled respect that had nothing to do with her Late Flame training. At Ash Reed, when inner students like Joren prepared for a check bout, they spent twenty minutes oiling their sword tassels, adjusting their silk cuffs, and warming their palms over charcoal pans while servants swept the sand for them. Ilyra checked the drainage slope, tested the stone bedding. Then she adjusted the leather sling of her travel pack so it wouldn’t swing across her kidneys during a pivot. She treated a fight in a wet mountain ruin with the same workmanlike seriousness Seyun brought to a stonework repair or a herb-weight audit.
“Your left arm,” Ilyra said, stopping at the southern column and nodding toward his gray sleeve, where he was wrapping his torn sleeping mat into a tight four-fold metal tube around his left forearm and securing it with double half-hitches of hemp cord. “You’re padding the forearm bone.”
“I have no staff and no shield,” Seyun replied. He pulled the final hemp knot tight with his teeth and testing the flex of his wrist. “And your spear shaft is seasoned mountain ash bound with iron collars. Taking a Late Flame bending on bare bone would crack my forearm bone on the first pass.”
“Four layers of rotten hemp mat won’t stop Late Flame force from bruising the nerve beneath,” she told him candidly.
“No,” Seyun agreed, flexing his left fingers once. “It only has to keep the bone in one piece for three exchanges.”
From her seat on the overturned stone mortar, Mother Renn watched the two of them over the rim of a chipped clay cup filled with hot rainwater. Her weathered face remained expressionless, yet as her gaze stayed on the way Seyun squared his shoulders—inward-drawn at the collarbones, elbows tucked close to protect the central return line—a flicker of old, sharp memory crossed her dark eyes.
“Come on, then,” Renn said. He set her clay cup down by the fire bowl and picking up her flat slate tile and brass tally-stick. “The rain is holding off on the ridge. My mule is tied down by the alder thicket eating weeds that don’t put fat on his ribs. State your rules and get it done.”