Down in the courtyard, Kes blew the wooden whistle twice. The fourteen students formed back into two wide ranks to practice the basic Dark Unwavering Plane. Daro’s foundational Bronze-practice sword guard, updated since last summer to include a backup side-stepping route alongside the main forward brace. The rhythmic thud of boots on packed river gravel rose toward the porch roof edges.
Daro watched a thirteen-year-old miller’s daughter check her own back foot posture without looking at Kes or at the porch, adjusting her stance purely by how her weight settled across her heels. He pointed the tip of his oak cane toward her boots.
“Look at Mara in the second row,” Daro said to Seyun. “When she finishes three years under this roof and goes back to guard her father’s grain wagons on the south road, she won’t have a sworn Jade rival walking beside her cart. She won’t have an ancient Balance stone tablet in her pack. She won’t have an enemy whose breakthroughs send a seven-dawn question into her chest to tell her what her stance is missing.”
He turned his shoulders toward Seyun, his voice level and exact. “That’s why my school still stands against the Answering Spirit vein as a model for training, Seyun. Not because you used the art dishonestly—you proved on the mountain that you’d rather lose your own endurance or give up the tablet than coerce a single human being. With Ilyra, your dispute was over whether the institutions were lying about the…
