Mina stood beside Vaska Ren’s chalked numeral 12 with her leather medical satchel at her hip. She looked around the circle of fighters with the cool, uncompromising gaze she had developed since the night an arrogant Ash Reed healer misdiagnosed their mother’s fatal fever. She didn’t care how deep a martial technique sounded if the body carrying it collapsed from neglected bleeding before reaching the field.
Unrolling her supply inventory on the corner of the stone stand, Mina announced the medical structure for the twelve-night countdown. Down in the lower hospice, she, Mother Renn, and sixteen-year-old Halin had inventoried every leftover jar of rendered salve, forty-two packets of dried reed-ash, nineteen rolls of boiled linen, and the leftover hanks of sheep-gut stitch thread.
Because eight of the twelve freed testers—including Senn in his torso brace—still needed daily spirit vein steadying exercises to prevent channel relapse, the hospice would run on strict rotating shifts.
Then Mina lifted her braided silk pulse cord and stated her binding rule for the martial rehearsals. Across the next twelve days and nights, zero training regimens that hidden a worsening injury in the name of the approaching deadline would be tolerated.
She looked directly at each wounded fighter in turn. At Seyun’s braced left ribs and aching chest bone scar. At Ilyra’s newly opened Early Jade channels. At Keth Or’s braced right wrist and freshly stitched three-fingered left hand. At Vaska Ren’s swollen, marsh-ash-bound throat. And at the twenty-year wire scars across Nara Soth’s back.
