For the first hour south of Oran, the post highway ran broad and level beside the willow-lined river before reaching the stone milestone where the older mountain burial road branched uphill toward the high ridges. Market carts laden with late-autumn cabbages and firewood passed them heading into town, the drivers nodding a casual greeting to the young man carrying a mattock on his right shoulder and the older white-haired woman walking beside him with her new ash staff.
Neither of them hurried. Seyun matched his stride to the comfortable, ground-covering pace Nara set. He listened to the quiet rhythm of Ilyra’s brass-ferruled staff clicking against the limestone gravel. Beneath his collar, the pale scar below his chest bone where Place III had rested throughout the mountain campaign was fully silent. Not a cut wire leaking heat, and not a locked door waiting to be pried open again, simply healed flesh that belonged to his own chest.
As they turned onto the quieter, leaf-strewn incline of the burial road toward the ruined Monastery of the Last Question, Seyun thought of what he had overheard two of Arbiter Venn’s junior delegates whispering at the hospice gate before the inner council party rode south. That the Aperture Court kept three other country seal monitoring stations in the western and southern prefectures. That half the elders in the capital were scared Nara Soth would spend the next decade marching from mountain to mountain to tear down their charter halls.
