In the narrow wooden bunk at the far corner of the hospice bunkhouse, with his stitched left calf resting inside Halin’s arched willow-wood foot cradle so the weight of the wool blanket didn’t press on his toes, Seyun fell asleep before the animal fat night-light by the door had burned down a quarter of an inch.
Around him in the dark room, the twelve freed testers breathed in the quiet, uneven chorus of people who had spent months wired to a cold stone pillar and were still relearning how to trust a mattress. Senn’s deep, rhythmic snore inside his loosened chest brace. Young Tov’s occasional half-whispered murmur. Halin’s light, steady breathing on the trundle cot nearest the clinic door. Outside in the root cellar, even Tavan’s forge hammer had gone silent for the middle watch.
Six hours before the eleventh dawn, Seyun dreamed he was twenty-two years old again. He stood on the painted white lime squares of the winter check hall at the Ash Reed Sect.
Everything in the dream possessed the sharp, hyper-distinct tactile reality of memory stored in the bones across eleven winters of repetition.
Under his bare heels, the polished grey slate tiles of the main pavilion were freezing cold. So cold that if an outer student stood at attention for twenty minutes waiting for the inner-court elders to finish their tea, the skin of his soles stuck slightly to the frost-rime when his name was called. In the four corners of the hall, tall bronze…
