After the noon meal, eight of the school’s youngest beginners—children between eleven and thirteen whose families worked the lower Oran docks and timber yards—filed through the front gate for their afternoon foundation class. Rather than taking the center of the yard himself, Daro Kesh settled onto a wooden bench on the shaded porch beside Seyun, resting his bandaged right leg on a low footstool. Meanwhile, he applied a thin coat of linseed oil to the hickory sticks they had used that morning.
Out on the gravel, twenty-year-old Kes stood before the eight children with a light wooden practice sword in his right hand.
Seyun watched the young teacher with quiet interest. Seven months ago, when Seyun had first examined Kes’s pulse in the overgrown back room of this compound during that earlier contest, the youth had been hiding a painful spirit vein constriction in his right forearm. Desperate to keep advancing while Daro’s school was closed by the court guards, Kes had secretly bought a copy of the Aperture Court’s standardized single-route sword primer and forced his breath through its rigid wrist lock every night, nearly scarring his tendons until Mina’s healing wraps and Daro’s revised multi-route order saved his arm. Later, in the northern ridge shelters, Kes had helped Seyun reach Deeper Bronze with a flexible practice cord, volunteered for the hillside medicine run under the pale blade that triggered Ilyra’s Early Jade, and co-designed the unscripted night proof drills with Pera.
