Mina was at Seyun’s side before he finished sitting up on the flat stone slabs, her fingers checking the spring-ash wrap over his left fifth and sixth ribs first before palpating the fresh bruise on his hip crest. “The rib callus didn’t shift because you landed flat on your shoulder blades,” she muttered, helping him stand and brushing the white frost from the back of his wool jacket, “though trying to break stone with your spine isn’t in my treatment manual.”
Seyun picked up his ash staff, wincing slightly as his bruised left hip took his weight, and joined Ilyra, Daro, Vaska. Keth around the silenced tripod.
While Seyun leaned lightly on his ash staff and shifted his weight off his bruised left hip, Hall Mistress Soran walked a slow circle around the silenced bronze tripod before stopping at the northern edge of the ring where the afternoon sun lit every face in the council.
Even without her ritual White Heron bell-spear Soran commanded the flat stone slabs with the quiet, rock-steady gravity of thirty winters in the Jade realm. It she had surrendered down in the foothills so her younger students wouldn’t be drawn into a slaughter against the Court’s Jade recovery officers. The plain iron spear in her hand had a grip wrapped in coarse tarred twine by her own fingers. Its blunt iron butt rang like a judge’s gavel when she tapped it against the stone.
