By noon, the last of the forty evacuated townspeople were moving down the sheltered walnut-grove trail toward the lower valley benches. They carried the iron cooking pots and dry grain sacks they had pulled from the outer sheds. Beside the intact granite boundary stone at the edge of the shrine ditch, Nara Soth sat upright on a cedar block with the back of her coarse hemp tunic unlaced to the waist. Seyun knelt behind her with a basin of warm snowmelt and a roll of clean linen, carefully dabbing the blood from the six reopened needle-scars across her shoulder blades before applying a thin layer of Mother Renn’s pine-pitch salve.
Across the churned mud, Ilyra wrenched her shortened marsh-iron spear out of the smoking threshold cinders and stared at the flattened ruin of the incense hall. Crushed slate tiles and split cedar beams lay heaped over the altar where the tenant families had slept only two hours earlier. Beneath the inner tie-beam, a dark stain in the ash marked where the two tethered milk goats had died.
“I was standing three feet from that inner top door beam,” Ilyra said. Her voice was tight with bitter self-reproach as she looked down at the dried blood of Tarn’s wrist on her sleeve. “When Seyun’s staff hit the returning route and bought those two breaths, my spear was already braced under the side lattice. If I had angled my Branching White Wake upward into the main crossbeam for one more heartbeat instead…
