Throughout the climb down the spur and the placing of the cedar tablet, Nara Soth had not crossed the low ring of mossy boundary stones that marked the edge of the burial shelf. She stood ten paces back under the twisted boughs of a mountain pine, her grey cloak pulled around her single shoulder and her right hand resting quietly atop her plain walking staff.
Neither Seyun nor Daro made the mistake of waving her forward or trying to broker a warm moment between her and the older woman.
Standing ten paces outside the mossy boundary stones under the mountain pine, Nara Soth looked older in that quiet afternoon light than she had looked when facing down the Measure’s pale blades on the hillside.
Against a sky blade ring or a Jade judge like Reth Mal, Nara knew exactly where her feet and her single arm belonged. Combat was a language she had spoken for three hundred winters. Standing two paces in front of a five-foot-tall village herb-seller whose nineteen-year-old son had suffocated in a locked basement room. Meanwhile, the abbey elders fought over Nara’s cell was a weight that no Crown technique could deflect.
Yet when Mother Renn stepped across the boundary stones and asked for one ordinary memory of Aven that had nothing to do with either sect’s proof, Nara didn’t look down at her boots in evasiveness or offer a platitude about the Dao.
