Seyun walked back down the north road toward Oran alongside Halin as the late-autumn twilight deepened into a clear, star-pricked night. They reached the timber gate of Master Orin’s wheelwright yard. Then, Halin continued down into the city to lock the clinic shutters for Mina. Meanwhile, Seyun climbed the outside pine stair to his second-floor room.
Inside, the room was cool, dry, and smelled pleasantly of shaved white ash and wood-oil from the workshop below. Seyun lit the brass lamp on his writing table, set a small iron kettle of water over the charcoal fire bowl to boil his evening slice of three-year bitter-root. Then he emptied his pockets onto the blotter.
Alongside his worn leather Account Book and the leather fold of three copper needles, he laid the heavy, blackened iron key to Daro Kesh’s side garden gate.
He sat down on the wooden stool and opened the Account Book to the current week’s pages. With the steady, unrushed hand he had practiced since his first winter at Ash Reed, he recorded the technical notes from yesterday’s and today’s courtyard sessions first. The half-inch drop of his right elbow when his left shoulder was tucked. The two-finger-width stride reduction that corrected it. The way Daro’s weight stayed half a count on his left heel when sparing his stitched right thigh. And the water-bucket wrist metaphor Kes had used to teach the cooper’s eleven-year-old son how to absorb a downward strike without locking his shoulder.
