Before anyone shifted their boots toward the mouth of the dark rock recess, Seyun rested his gloved left hand over the linen bandage pinned around his right forearm. Down at the lower shepherd’s hospice, where nineteen-year-old Mina was currently tending the boiled willow-bark pot and watching over sixteen-year-old Halin, his younger sister had enforced a strict cold and exact rule on every wounded fighter who sat on her bench. Before you stood up to test a stitched leg or a braced wrist under load, you had to state out loud the exact physical sign at which you would sit back down.
If you waited until the heat of the test to decide when to stop, Mina had told them with her blunt healer’s candor, pride and fight-or-flight rush would lie to you every time until the stitch tore open. On the first watch of the ridge assault, they had learned that Heaven’s Measure used their unstated, open-ended rescues to herd them into a single net. Applying Mina’s hospice rule to the second watch meant that before a single fighter stepped out from under the granite brow, every pair had to declare not only what they intended to strike. But the exact physical threshold at which they would break contact and withdraw.
