While Seyun sat upright on the western granite bench with his shirt collar unfastened, Mina laid a folded linen pad soaked in cold snowmelt and crushed marsh-mint directly over the flushed red streak beneath his right collarbone. Her fingers checked his outward pulse at the wrist, counting the beats until the bounding heat of the incipient inflammation subsided.
“You stopped two breaths before the inner lining blistered,” Mina said, her tone briskly approving as she pinned the cold compress inside his shirt. “If you had tried to finish that swing to look impressive in front of the low roof wall, you would be lying in the cave beside Steward Osen for a week. Willingness and ambition don’t widen a Bronze vessel into Jade.”
Daro Kesh stood beside the bench. He looked down at the open page of Seyun’s Account Book where the word Incomplete sat drying in the cold air. There was no mockery in the older swordsman’s face. Only the focused, practical math of a teacher who had spent fifteen years figuring out why a student’s shoulder locked on a third form.
While the cold snowmelt and crushed marsh-mint compress Mina had pinned inside Seyun’s shirt collar drew the hot sting out of his right subclavian channel, Daro Kesh crouched beside the western granite bench and used the point of his hickory practice sword to trace two diagrams in the frost on the flat stone slab.
