By early afternoon, the sun cleared the high mist above the seal court, warming the top edges of the scored granite pillars. Seyun stood up from the nook bench, resting one hand lightly on his ash staff to keep his aching chest bone channel relaxed. Then he walked out into the open courtyard where Nara Soth was checking the leather metal ring of her walking staff.
For the first time since they had spoken through the bronze wires of the Hollow Summit pillar, Seyun stood three paces from her and felt nothing at all inside his chest. When she shifted her weight or drew a breath, no silver curve warmed beneath his ribs. If she turned around right now and walked south down the old road to see the ocean she had missed for three hundred years, no mark would ache to tell him which valley she had entered.
Because the question mattered to every villager on the hillside and every freed tester in the lower hospice, Seyun didn’t wrap it in polite indirection. He asked her plainly whether she would still stand with them when Heaven’s Measure dropped.
Nara grounded her wooden staff on the flat stone slab and looked at him with her clear, weathered eye. She didn’t make him sweat for an answer, nor did she pretend that the turning white ring above the northern ridge was none of her concern. She answered yes right away—and then stated the single boundary needed to keep that yes clean.
