The small yellow circle of light from Kes’s half-shuttered brass lamp looked extraordinarily bright against the surrounding blackness of the hospice yard.
In the center of the cone, Seyun could see the stitched leather toes of Kes’s boots, a patch of gray mortar between two river flat stone slabs, and a single dry apple leaf blown in from the orchard. Everything outside that three-foot ring was swallowed by the shadow of the high stone walls. Ten feet to the east of the lamp, where Pera stood near the wooden water barrel, only the faintest wet glint of light on the rim of her wide clay medicine bowl marked her presence whenever she tilted her wrists.
“Listen to the setup, Seyun,” Pera said from the dark, her voice brisk and businesslike. “Kes and I are starting here at the south curb and crossing forty feet north to the clinic porch steps. Bel Sar is standing on the west margin with his padded seven-foot pole. He’s going to walk alongside the lane swinging Bronze-weight sweeps across our path—high, low, and slanted—just like the pressure lens up at the court, except Bel doesn’t run on clockwork springs.”
“And I’m not pulling my swings if your staff misses the bending,” Bel Sar added from the western darkness, thumping the quilted head of his heavy pole once against his palm. “The wool padding won’t break an arm. But if it catches you or either of them square on the shoulder, you’ll know you were hit.”
