A shielded grease-lamp hung from an iron hook inside the western stone nook of the seal court, throwing steady yellow light across the dry cedar pallets Mina had arranged out of the mountain wind. Stripped to the waist in the chilly recess. Meanwhile, his sister unpinned the linen chest wraps, Seyun kept his palms flat on his knees and focused on drawing slow, even breaths into the lower third of his lungs. Along the left side of his ribs, the skin over the fifth and sixth ribs was mottled purple-green and yellow from Commander Keth Or’s second spatial squeezing stroke in the northern chamber.
Mina didn’t waste words on sympathy. She laid three cool, steady fingers across his left outward pulse, listened for ten heartbeats while watching the rise of his collarbone. Then pressed her thumb firmly along the rib gap between the fifth and sixth ribs.
Seyun’s stomach muscles tightened involuntarily, though he kept his teeth together.
“The bone ends haven’t slipped,” Mina said. She lifted the old, dried cake of grey reed-ash healing wrap from his skin with a flat bone spatula and dropping it into her waste bowl. “Your ash-wood slats held when you hit the flat stone slab. What didn’t hold was your breathing discipline between the third and fifth breath of that three-way pass. You locked your glottis when you tried to guess Daro’s step.”
