Before the wooden metal ring of Nara Soth’s walking staff could drop toward the eastern octagon, Seyun took two quick steps across the frost-heaved flat stone slabs and placed his shoulder between her lifted arm and the granite face. The abrupt lateral push sent a hot needle of pain through the braced fifth and sixth ribs on his left side. That made his jaw clench inside his wool collar. He deliberately kept his Early Bronze breath still in his forearms. Raising a defensive mantle against a Crown fighter whose back still bore the red tracks of the Listening Crown wouldn’t stop her blow. It would only turn an argument into a reflex test.
“Step aside, bearer,” Nara said, her staff hovering three inches above his right collarbone where Daro’s mark lay hidden beneath the linen shirt. The joined intentions in her single arm pressed the cold mountain air downward until the loose grit around Seyun’s boots skittered outward across the stone. “We agreed at the summit pillar that I wouldn’t break Master Uren’s tablet while a single tester’s breathing depended on it. None of those twelve children are chained to these twenty-four stones.”
“They aren’t,” Seyun said. He kept his hands open at his sides so she could see he held neither ash staff nor copper needle. “And if you shatter all twenty-four pillars before sunset, nobody in this court can stop you. I’m asking you to wait ten breaths until we read what’s actually cut underneath the Court’s numbers.”
