By the eastern pillar, Daro Kesh raised his right hand to shoulder height. He waited for the binding terms to be spoken aloud. In the lantern light, Mina watched her brother’s chest rise and fall, ready to call a medical halt the instant his breathing violated the eight-breath pleural limit.
Seyun rested his left hand lightly against the front of his scorched wool coat where the third silver mark lay beneath his chest bone. “The object of this contest is the original Balance tablet hanging on the cord behind me,” Seyun said clearly. “If Nara’s staff touches the stone. Or if she forces me out of the pillar ring so I can no longer interpose my stave, she wins the tablet and the right to do with it whatever her judgment needs.”
“And what’s the condition on your defense?” Daro asked in the formal rhythm of an independent judge.
“I must preserve the tablet while leftover physically capable of withdrawing from the contest under my own control,” Seyun answered. He looked directly across the mist at Nara Soth’s scarred face. “If my defense of that stone depends at any point on making Nara responsible for my collapse—if I place my healing ribs, my throat. Or my inward channels into an overload where she can only touch the tablet by crippling me—then I have forfeited the contest.”
