The watchfire at the southern corner of the seal court burned low in a sunken ring of dry pine knots, sheltered by the low roof wall so its glow wouldn’t draw eyes from the lower valley road. Seyun sat on a granite block across the coals from his first two sworn rivals, his scorched coat wrapped around his knees. For the first time since they climbed out of the northern chamber with Halin and the leftover testers, the three of them had an hour without litters on their shoulders or test judges at their throats. And the firelight laid out the material cost of that rescue in plain view.
To Seyun’s left, Ilyra drew a flat gray river whetstone along the double-edged marsh-iron head of her White Heron spear. It was the same weapon Seyun had freed from the burial-road funerary shrine with a mourner’s phrase in the first week after his expulsion. The same spear she had carried through her Early Bronze awakening in the reed marsh and her Deeper Bronze stand against Arel Fen at the snow bridge. In the northern chamber, however, intercepting Reth Mal’s ritual-amplified pale blade to save Seyun’s life had snapped away the outer third of its seasoned white-ash shaft.
