Up on the seal court flat stone slabs, Mina had already set her brass sand glass to the strict twelve-breath mark on the western mounting block, while sixteen-year-old Halin tended the small charcoal fire bowl keeping the clay pot bowl of Bel Sar’s stone spring-ash paste steaming under a linen cloth. Hall Mistress Soran, Vaska Ren, and Daro Kesh stood ready around the bronze pressure lens.
“Four sessions of twelve breaths each,” Mina called out as Seyun stepped into the ring with Nara’s plain, plain ash staff. “Thirty minutes of full sitting rest under the ash wrap between sessions. If I see the vein above your left collar bone cord up once, we stop on that beat.”
Seyun nodded, settled his rear heel at the two-finger widened width. Then he felt the cool, clear ringing of Ilyra’s seventh-dawn Jade echo still waiting inside Place I.
Across the late afternoon and early evening of the sixth day, as the sun dropped behind the western peaks and the first iron-bright stars pricked through the purple dusk above the northern ridge, Seyun completed all four of the twelve-breath practice sessions Mina had authorized.
He used the plain, plain mountain ash staff Nara Soth had whittled for him. Without iron ferrules weighting the tips, the bare wood felt startlingly honest in his hands. His grip tightened by even a fraction to herd an ally. Each time, he felt the stiffness right away in the grain before it could travel up into his left collarbone…
