While Daro and Bel Sar took Kes to the far side of the terrace to review the drainage-trench angle, Seyun and Ilyra sat together on the cold granite steps in the late-morning sun. Seven hundred days ago, on the rain-swept burial road below the abbey, Ilyra had bound Seyun’s wrists with the silk tassel of her White Heron spear. That was because she believed any student expelled by a chartered sect must be a criminal. Seyun had kept Master Uren’s letter hidden in his sleeve. That was because he trusted no one wearing hall colors.
Now the silk tassel was long gone, replaced by tight bands of soaked rawhide holding her cracked ash shaft together. There was no stance of superiority left between them.
Ilyra ran her thumb slowly along the raised ridge of rawhide in the middle of her spear.
Seyun sat shoulder to shoulder on the cold granite step. Meanwhile, the morning sun climbed higher above the eight-sided pillars. He and Ilyra were far enough from the center ring that the scrape of Daro’s and Bel’s boots faded into the background. Between them, the warm stone spring-ash healing wrap under Seyun’s collar smelled faintly of sulfur and wet mountain stone. Across Ilyra’s knees lay the shortened White Heron spear whose outer third had been snapped off by Reth Mal’s pale blade in the northern chamber and whose leftover ash shaft was bound tight with Pera’s wheelwright rawhide hitches.
