Seyun didn’t interrupt the walk in the herb garden. He turned away from the low wall, walked around the corner of the drying shed to the wooden water trough fed by the hospice’s hillside pipe. Then he broke the thin skin of evening ice with the heel of his palm. He plunged both hands up to the wrists into the numbing mountain water. He scrubbed the white chalk and dark stone grit from the old burn scars across his palms.
The cold water bit into his skin. Then, he forced himself to look squarely at the brief, ugly sting he had felt watching Nara Soth turn away from his rehearsal to walk with Halin.
It would have been easy to dress the feeling up in respectable clothes. He could have told himself that he wanted Nara watching the seal court. That was because the twelve-night assault depended on their coordination, or that he missed the strategic guidance of a Crown master. Both excuses were lies, and after seven hundred days of keeping an honest Account Book under Mina’s eyes, Seyun knew the smell of his own evasions.
What had stung on the low roof wall was simpler and much smaller: vanity.
