On the fourth morning in Oran, Seyun stood outside the modest ground-floor corner room Mina had leased two blocks inside the lower market gate, holding one end of a scrubbed pine check table at waist height while Halin held the other.
Around them, the lower market street was already wide awake. Heavy six-mule grain wagons rumbled over the granite cobbles from the river wharf, dock porters trotted past with hemp bales balanced on padded shoulder yokes. The smell of fresh-baked flatbread mixed with river mud and pine tar. Half a mile uphill, the chartered sect infirmaries and Master Kaelen’s medicine room sat behind quiet garden walls approached by flights of twelve or twenty white stone steps.
Here, the single wide oak door of Mina’s rented room sat fully flush with the street cobblestones. Not a single step, raised doorstep, or fancy threshold bar stood between the road and the scrubbed floorboards inside.
“When you asked why I didn’t want a courtyard pavilion in the upper ward,” Mina said, propping the street door open with a wooden wedge so they could carry the table straight through, “look at the porter passing the corner with the salt keg.”
Seyun glanced over his shoulder as they set the pine table down inside the bright front room. The dock porter walking past moved with a stiff, guarded tilt of his pelvis. The exact gait of a man nursing an old lower-back sprain or a pinched lower return channel.
