Halfway down the stone lane from the hospice, Seyun paused beside the low hawthorn hedge at the corner of Tavan’s yard.
He carried the plain, plain ash staff Nara had given him yesterday across his shoulder. The gray stone-ash compress Mina had bound over his left collarbone after his second morning session still held a faint cellar coolness against his skin. He had walked down to meet Nara for their afternoon staff drill on the threshing floor. Hearing Tavan’s quiet question over the garden wall, Seyun kept his boots still on the frozen mud so he wouldn’t interrupt the metalworker.
He knew what an Ash Reed elder or an Aperture Court steward would have said to a civilian smith five days before a mountain crisis.
The winter floods threatened the lower water gates during Seyun’s seventh year at Ash Reed. Then, Senior Elder Tor Ves had stood on the market steps in his stitched bronze robes and promised the tenant farmers that the sect’s array pillars would turn every drop of river water aside without wetting a single granary floor. Two days later, when the east dike gave way anyway, three families lost their seed barley. That was because they had trusted the elder’s certainty and left their sacks on the ground floor. Institutions loved sweeping reassurances. A comforting lie kept common people quiet in their houses until the decision was over, and if the promise failed, the people who made it were always high enough up the hill to…
