As twilight deepened into the first night of the twelve-night countdown, sixteen-year-old Halin and nineteen-year-old Kes lit the hooded oil lanterns along the outer edge of the abandoned seal court. Inside the sheltered western stone nook. There, a flat granite slab served as both medicine counter and clerk’s desk, Seyun sat down with Mina, Chief Examiner Vaska Ren, and Halin to conduct a complete, line-by-line audit of their northern campaign in the back pages of his worn Ash Reed Account Book.
Nothing that had been spent over the past nine days since dropping from the Hollow Summit was smoothed over, softened in sectarian ink, or omitted to make the record look triumphant.
Seyun opened to the left-hand page under the steady yellow flame of the grease-lamp. He dipped his reed pen and read each material and bodily cost aloud as he entered it into the column so Mina and Vaska could check the figures against their own slates.
First stood the losses from the opening sky-blade tests on the mountain. The old hillside village shrine demolished to blackened rafters. Tarn the Miller’s Ford cooper’s right hand crushed under the falling top door beam and amputated cleanly at the wrist by Mina. Two winter-milk goats killed beneath the collapsed beams. And Daro Kesh’s original Bronze longsword shattered into three pieces in the northern chamber, replaced by a plain twenty-two-inch short sword forged from three salvaged Ash Reed fire ribs after Joren refused to claim a fourth rib he hadn’t earned.
