The stitched sheaf of coarse hemp paper in Seyun’s hand was twelve pages long, written by grease-lamp light over the past three nights. Meanwhile, he rested his braced ribs in the western nook of the seal court. Before Nara Soth took her first step toward the southern threshold with Master Uren’s twelve-pound grey stone tablet cradled beneath her single right arm, Seyun walked over to where Mina stood beside her canvas medical kit near the western eight-sided pillar and placed the paper booklet into his sister’s hands.
At the center of the frost-whitened flat stone slabs, beneath the slack hemp cord where the tablet had hung three breaths earlier, Nara Soth stopped. Her dark eyes narrowed slightly as she watched written pages change hands right away after the contest had been decided.
“You made a written copy of the tablet before the bout?” Nara asked, her weathered fingers tightening around the carved grey stone against her forearm.
“Read the pages before Mina packs them, Nara,” Seyun said. He kept his plain ash staff grounded vertically by his boot and holding out his open left hand toward his sister’s medical kit. “Every leaf is stitched in order. Nothing was left behind in the nook.”
