Two hours before sunrise on the fifth morning after the summit liberation, freezing mountain mist drifted silently between the twenty-four eight-sided granite pillars of the abandoned seal court. There was no tiered gallery of sect elders in brocade robes watching from a warm dais as there had been at Ash Reed’s winter check. There were no two hundred roaring spectators counting breaths around a brass cage as there had been in Oran’s river-district wrestling lodge when Seyun and Daro first contested the tablet. Not even Ilyra or Hall Mistress Soran had been called down from the ridge watch.
Only two witnesses stood on the frost-whitened flat stone slabs. By the western pillar, Mina held a shielded horn lantern in her left hand. Meanwhile, her right hand rested on her unrolled canvas medical kit—three bone splints, a jar of reed-ash paste, and her silk pulse cord laid out on a dry cloth. By the eastern pillar—the very octagon bearing Sel Oran’s ancient stumble-mark—Daro Kesh stood with his arms folded over his chest and his new twenty-two-inch plain short sword sheathed at his belt.
Between the two central pillars of the middle row, Daro had tied a length of Kes’s braided hemp cord at chest height. Suspended from the center of that cord by a simple slip-loop hung Master Uren’s original grey slate tablet, its silver-wired spirit vein channels catching the dim yellow glow of Mina’s lantern.
