Seyun stood beside the granite signpost at the fork as twilight deepened from plum to clear winter indigo. The first early star pricked through the sky above the southern plains. A thin, crisp rime of frost began to silver the tips of the roadside weeds around his boots.
Down the straight white ribbon of the coastal highway, the steady tap, tap, tap of Nara Soth’s brass-ferruled mountain-ash staff carried clearly through the still evening air. For two hundred paces he could still see the pale gleam of her white hair and the straight, unrushed line of her grey wool coat moving between the dark silhouettes of the cypress trees along the ditch.
He thought of the first time he had ever heard of the third mark in Master Uren’s warning letter. The first time he had seen Nara sitting in the dim bronze light of the Hollow Summit vault during that earlier ordeal. Her back pierced with silver spreading needles, her right wrist scarred, her huge Crown training harnessed like a waterwheel to turn Heaven’s Measure away from the valleys while twelve younger testers lay wired to beds around her feet.
For three hundred years, since the afternoon she was a nineteen-year-old girl with a wooden sword who beat young Sel Oran in a public match. Then she made him laugh with delight at the flaw in his own stance, the world had treated Nara Soth’s strength as public property. First her friends’ successors had built walls around her so…
