Mother Renn didn’t gasp, cross her fingers against forbidden arts, or call out to the White Heron spearwoman at the far end of the gallery.
She leaned down with a small grunt of old knees, picked up her brass tally-stick and slate tile from the rim of the stone mortar, and walked unhurriedly over to the doorway post where Seyun sat retieing the frayed hemp cord around his singed sleeping mat. Standing between him and Ilyra so her broad waxed-hemp cape screened him from the southern end of the court, the old woman looked down once more at the thin silver curve disappearing beneath his gray lapel.
“Well,” Mother Renn murmured in a voice pitched just low enough to die beneath the patter of roof edges water. “Whoever your teacher down in that cellar was, boy, he chose an expensive way for a stubborn youth to learn humility.”
Seyun’s fingers stilled on the hemp knot. He looked up into her weathered, unimpressed face.
“You have seen a mark like this before,” he said quietly.
“I’ve seen men who wore three of them sit at stone tables and argue about the weight of the sky while their tea went cold,” Renn replied dryly, slipping her brass tally into the leather loop of her basket. “And I’ve seen what happens to a chest when a boy thinks opening a return door is the same thing as furnishing the house. Keep your collar buttoned while the White Heron girl is tying her saddlebags, unless you want to spend the morning explaining twenty-year-old ghosts before you’ve eaten breakfast.”
At the southern arch of the gallery, Ilyra slid her marsh-iron spear into its oiled leather road-sword sheath and tested the buckle over her right shoulder so the strap wouldn’t press on her bandaged left shoulder muscle. She walked back toward the doorway they had repaired. She looked down at Seyun’s scraped shin and the singed wool of his left sleeve.
“We have four leagues of mud between this hill and the wayside crossroads outside Oran,” Ilyra said, her tone practical and devoid of gloating. “I need to check the creek ford below the shrine first to make sure last night’s ambushers didn’t leave a rear watch on the road. Can you walk at cart pace without slowing the march?”
“I can walk,” Seyun said. He rose smoothly to his feet by pushing through his uninjured left leg. As he stood, the newly opened return path beneath his left collarbone pulled tight like a fresh stitch in muscle. It sent a sharp, clean ache across his upper chest. He didn’t wince, though Mother Renn’s left eyebrow twitched fractionally at the stiffness in his left shoulder.
“Good,” Ilyra said. She glanced at the bulge beneath his robe where the wrapped stone diagram and his Account Book rested against his chest bone. “Remember the terms of the floor, Seyun. You carry the stone unbound so long as you walk within my escort to Oran. If you step off the road into the brush, the next exchange won’t use the flat of the iron.”
“I have more reason to reach Oran than you do,” Seyun answered. “My sister is in that city. The people who ordered Joren’s false breakthrough didn’t stay on Ash Reed mountain.”
Ilyra gave a brief nod of acknowledgment and strode out through the repaired doorway toward the tethered bay mare waiting under the cedar trees below the terrace, her boots crunching briskly across the wet gravel as she went down to scout the creek ford.
While Ilyra’s footsteps faded down the terraced stone path toward the creek ford below the abbey, Mother Renn crouched beside her tiny charcoal pan in the shelter of the repaired doorway and gestured impatiently for Seyun to move closer out of the wind.
“Don’t sit there letting the river draft blow down your neck like a plucked goose,” the old woman grunted. She pulled a flat iron ladle and a wooden pestle from the side loops of her wicker basket. “Come over here by the coals and unbutton that top frog so I can see whether the line seated clean or tore the muscle tissue.”
Seyun paused for half a breath. Ten minutes ago Mother Renn had been a nameless wayside witness hired with twenty minutes of carpentry. Now she was speaking of Balance spirit vein anatomy with the brisk familiarity of a sick room matron. Yet the raw, stinging heat beneath his left collarbone was growing sharper with every dozen heartbeats as the cold air hit his sweat-damp shirt. His own experience tending Mina’s childhood fevers told him that pride in front of a knowledgeable elder was a fool’s luxury.
He moved over to the dry flat stone slab beside her fire bowl. He set his bundled sleeping mat behind his hip. Then he loosened the top linen knot of his collar.
Beneath his left collar bone. There, the skin over his first rib met the hollow of the shoulder, the thin silver curve gleamed with a faint, metal pallor against the flushed red of his skin. It was perhaps an inch and a quarter long, shaped like a crescent paring-knife stroke, neither bleeding nor raised into a welt. But streaming a dry, nearby heat that made the fine hairs on his chest curl.
Mother Renn leaned in without touching the mark directly. She held the back of her weathered knuckle half an inch above the silver curve to judge the blasting heat.
“Clean seat,” she muttered after three breaths. She pulled her hand back and nodding once toward the southern road where Ilyra had gone. “No ragged branches into the shoulder vein, and no black bruising over the lung tip. That White Heron girl means what she says when she gives her word—if she’d had half a lie in her mouth when she answered you, the line would have hooked sideways and blistered your throat.”
She looked straight into Seyun’s eyes across the small curl of birch smoke.
“And you meant what you said too. Or you’d be spitting blood onto my flat stone slabs right now,” Renn added, her voice flat and unsentimental. “Which means for the first time in twenty winters, somebody is walking down the Oran road wearing a live Balance mark on his chest. Now hold still while I crush these stalks, before that spearwoman comes back up the hill and wonders why an incense peddler is doctoring her prisoner’s collarbone.”
She reached into the bottom of her wicker basket, past the bundles of common pine-resin cones that any road court guard might inspect. Then she drew out a flat leather roll tied with raw, unwhitened flax string. The working kit of someone who had spent years preparing spirit vein healing wraps for channels that every chartered school in the valleys claimed had been wiped out.
Left alone with Mother Renn beneath the repaired oak top door beam, Seyun leaned one hand against the cool limestone door post. Then he drew a cautious test breath through the first Ash Reed base stance.
The change inside his spirit vein stonework was clear and sobering. For eleven years, circulating Coal breath had felt like pumping water into a capped iron pipe. Pressure built rapidly, warmed his limbs to a fixed threshold. Then stalled dead behind his collarbones. Now, as the thin stream of internal heat rose along his left side, it met the silver curve of Place I and turned inward along a hair-thin, raw seam toward his heart-sac.
Nothing came through from Ilyra’s side to push it. The seam was barely the width of a silk thread, tender as burned skin. Every breath that touched it scraped with a dry friction that made his throat tighten. If he tried to force heavy breath flow through that raw vessel without medicine or gradual daily work, he would inflame his chest long before Ilyra ever fought another battle.
He pulled his linen Account Book from inside his robe, balanced the cedar backing board on his forearm. Then he uncapped his brass travel ink-case to record the dawn contest and the opening of the first mark in the strict ledger format he had promised himself down in Uren’s vault.
Before he could slide the Account Book back inside his shirt, Mother Renn set her heavy wicker basket down beside the threshold, unbuckled a lower side pouch lined with oiled bladder-skin. Then he pulled out a small, tightly folded packet of dark gray river-reed stalks and charred pith.
“Put the ink brush away before you drop it in the mud, clerk,” Renn said. He held the packet out toward his chest. “Your girl is checking the creek ford for twenty minutes. If you walk four leagues with a raw Balance seam rubbing dry against your ribs, you’ll be coughing blood before we pass the first toll-post. Sit down by my fire bowl and let me show you what reed ash is actually for.”