From her place beside the herb-drying rack, Mina watched the tension leave sixteen-year-old Halin’s neck as Seyun’s question settled in the sunlit garden. For days after she had drawn the last silver-and-bronze restraint needle out of the boy’s collarbone in the northern chamber, Halin had carried his shoulders hunched slightly forward, as if waiting for the older fighters who had rescued him to hand him the bill for his survival.
Now, told plainly that nobody needed him to swing a sword or bleed into a rivalry mark to pay for his keep, Halin looked once at the six-foot ash staff resting beside Seyun’s knee. And then turned his head toward the open doorway of Mina’s treatment shed.
Inside the hospice treatment shed, the midday light fell through a single high greased-parchment window onto the scrubbed boards where Mina kept her test charts. As Halin spoke from the garden bench about what he remembered from the northern chamber. Not the clashing of Jade spears or the shattering of Reth Mal’s amplified blade. But the four quiet breaths Mina had waited for him to describe the cold line under his ribs before she touched her bronze pliers to his collar needle. Seyun stood quietly by the bench and let the conversation belong entirely to his sister and the boy.
