Before the fifth-watch watchman had even blown his horn along Oran’s north wall, Seyun woke in the dark, struck a spark to his charcoal fire bowl. Then he set the small iron kettle on the grate. On the seventh morning after Nara Soth walked south, Mina had removed the last figure-eight linen wrap from his left shoulder. She cleared the joint for unbraced movement while reminding him that the ninety-day winter season had eighty-three dawns leftover.
While the water heated, Seyun dropped one thumb-sized slice of three-year Ash Reed bitter-root into his clay mug. When the kettle boiled, he poured the water over the dark bark, waited thirty breaths for the liquid to turn the color of steeped walnut hulls. Then he drank it down by the window. The taste was every bit as fierce and astringent as Bel Sar had promised—coating the back of the tongue like boiled oak-gall and chimney soot—yet within two minutes a clean, non-inflammatory warmth spread through his stomach and softened the morning stiffness around his healed left shoulder capsule.
Seyun pulled a plain grey woollen practice tunic over his head. He walked silently down the outside stair into Master Orin’s wheelwright courtyard.
Winter had settled over the river valley in earnest. There were no dropping sky blades, no masked recovery squads, and no bronze bells tolling from the mountain passes. Only hard white hoarfrost rimming the stacked ashwood wagon felloes and a quarter-inch skin of clear ice across the rain barrel by the well…
