Behind the heavy linen curtain that separated the consultation room from the small back kitchen, the iron stove Daro’s students had installed radiated a steady, dry warmth against the evening chill. Mina set two clay bowls of hot turnip-and-barley stew and a loaf of dark rye bread on the small pine table Seyun had carried in the day before, and brother and sister sat down opposite each other under the single hanging oil lamp.
Outside on the market street, the iron-tired grain wagons had finished unloading for the night, leaving only the occasional footsteps of town watchmen and the distant horn of a timber barge on the Oran river.
For nineteen months—ever since the winter afternoon Elder Hesh handed Seyun three copper needles at Ash Reed’s gate. Then he kept his saved herb share. Almost every meal the two of them had eaten together had taken place in the shadow of an immediate emergency. Under the ferry landing when his chest was inflamed, in the back of Mother Renn’s cart outside White Heron Hall, in a snowbound shepherd’s hospice, or beside a northern seal court waiting for twelve pale blades to fall.
Halfway through the meal, Mina set her wooden spoon down neatly beside her bowl, folded her hands on the pine tabletop, and looked directly across at Seyun.
