While Daro Kesh, Ilyra, Bel Sar, and Keth Or checked the hemp friction-cord wraps on their boot soles up on the seal court terrace so they wouldn’t slip on the frost-glazed granite seams above, Seyun walked down the lantern-lit stone steps with Halin and Pera to the lower shepherd hospice for the last ten minutes before departure.
Down in the lee of the granite spur, the hospice courtyard was organized with the quiet, unsentimental competence of people who knew that a battle doesn’t end when the last sword stroke lands—it ends in the treatment ward over the days that follow.
By the outdoor hearth pits near the kitchen porch, Mother Renn and the limping village metalworker Tavan had three heavy cast-iron cooking pots simmering over banked river-coal fires. Two of the cooking pots held thick, nourishing porridge boiled from the sixty-pound sack of hulled winter barley Mer had gifted to the clinic after the livestock-shelf rescue, seasoned with dried mutton and crushed ginger root to restore body heat to fighters coming down out of freezing height. The third cooking pot held ten gallons of boiled willow-bark and salt wash kept just below a simmer so clean, sterile irrigation water would be ready the instant the first wounded defender was carried through the gate.
