Inside the white-tiled check hall of the Oran Healers’ Guild, three senior pulse masters sat behind a long cedar table with Mina’s bound case portfolio open between them. While Seyun, Halin, and Pera waited outside on the street cobbles, Mina stood before the board with only her linen pulse pillow and her small thirty-breath brass sand-glass in her apron pocket.
For the first hour, the test judges questioned her on the twelve anonymized spirit vein-release sequences she had submitted from the Hollow Summit and the lower hospice. Unlike almost every other applicant who appeared before the Guild Mina had left every early failed try and imperfect shift in plain ink. He polished their case histories so every decoction read like an infallible triumph.
She had recorded how her first breathing-pause set on the snow ridge had proved inadequate for Candidate Three’s (Senn’s) heavily scarred dorsal channel. How pulling Candidate Two’s (Pera’s) main wire had sent unexpected backup oscillations into two next-door beds before the three copper needles split the load. And how reed-ash compresses fully failed to halt channel blistering once a fighter forced three same-time routes without rest.
Master Physician Korr, the eldest of the three test judges and a man trained fifty years ago in Ash Reed’s formal medical hall, tapped the snow-ridge entry with a fingernail.
