Before sunrise on the eighth morning. Meanwhile, the main ward was still waking to the smell of boiling barley water, Ilyra sat at the narrow desk in the hospice study room alongside Joren and the two independent mountain teachers, Master Bren of West Scree and Instructor Yul of Pine Ford. Spread across the scarred pine tabletop were two sets of documents that had taken nineteen months of travel, injury, and sacrifice to bring onto the same surface. The original copper-and-charcoal heat tallies from the Ash Reed Sect’s winter check fire room, and the stamped Aperture Court storehouse delivery docket that Seyun had forfeited a week of reed-ash medicine to purchase in Oran.
Joren sat without the stitched inner-court sash he had worn on the day of Seyun’s expulsion. Dressed in plain undyed cotton, his hands still bearing the calluses of the fire-room salvage where he and Seyun had pried three spirit-hardened metal ribs from the collapsed vessel to forge Daro Kesh’s short sword, the former favored student traced the third-watch charcoal marks with a steady wooden pointer.
“Here is the seventh valve notch,” Joren said, his voice quiet and fully free of the defensive bluster he had used in Ash Reed’s courtyard months ago. “Elder Hesh told the visiting patrons that the fire spirit was an ordinary sect-bred ember and that the heat spike only began when Seyun stepped out of the outer ranks and shouted at the platform. Look at the copper spreading line three inches to the left…
