Mina was on her feet before the second syllable of her name faded, pulling her gray wool shawl around her shoulders and picking up her linen pulse pillow and the small brass sand-glass from the table. She crossed the pine floorboards in her stocking feet without waking a single sleeper along the wall. Then she knelt on the cedar prayer mat beside Seyun’s cot.
She didn’t scold him for waking her at midnight, nor did she ask if he had been dreaming about the northern chamber. She set the linen pillow across his right knee, guided his uninjured wrist onto the pad, and laid her three cool middle fingers along the wrist blood vessel while flipping the thirty-breath sand-glass with her left hand.
For two full turns of the glass, neither of them spoke. The only sounds in the room were the soft hiss of the animal fat wick, the distant trickle of rainwater down the stone gutter outside, and the whisper of fine river sand falling through the brass neck. After the first count, Mina shifted her thumb lightly to the hollow below his right collarbone. She felt the steady, dormant warmth of Daro’s mark, then pressed two fingers gently against the breastbone above the pale scar of Nara’s closed place.
