Joren didn’t draw a weapon. In the first base form of the Ash Reed manual—Rooting the Reed in River Silt—the fighter’s palms remained open at hip level. Meanwhile, the first measure of internal Coal breath was drawn from the lower belly up the dorsal channel to the base of the neck. Every novice in the yard knew the rhythm by heart: four counts up the spine, two counts across the shoulders, four counts settling into the wrists.
Joren began the inhale. Seyun watched closely from six paces away. He didn’t need to press a finger to Joren’s wrist blood vessel to read what was happening inside the younger man’s torso. During their shared entry into the unstable check fire room during that earlier ordeal, when Joren had helped salvage the three spirit-hardened metal ribs for Daro Kesh’s short sword and deliberately refused the lingering fire echo in the bronze vessel, Seyun had seen the exact shape of Joren’s injury. The borrowed spirit had stretched the third chest junction like an over-driven wedge. That left a slick, scarred hollow that constantly tempted the fighter’s breath to rush upward too fast in imitation of Bronze projection.
On the third count of the inhale, as Joren’s internal Coal warmth reached that scarred junction between his shoulder blades, his shoulders twitched with the old reflex to surge forward.
