By the third week of the winter season, the flat cobblestone yard beside the Number Three Timber Wharf had become Seyun’s regular morning classroom on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.
He could easily have lived the winter on easier silver. Two wealthy grain factors in Oran’s upper ward had sent clerks to the wheelwright’s house offering twenty silver pieces a month if the young Jade fighter who had stood against the inner council delegation would sit in their counting-house courtyards for two hours an afternoon—essentially renting his name as a deterrent against rival merchant houses. Seyun had declined both offers the same afternoon they arrived. Sitting in a silk chair as a merchant’s scarecrow was just another version of hanging red banners in Ash Reed’s pavilion. He had no desire to eat bread paid for by intimidation.
Instead, he worked with Pera at the docks and the lower caravan yards.
At the fourth morning bell, six river barge pole-men and four veteran wagon guards stood in a semi-circle between two stacks of squared pine beams. Meanwhile, the river fog rolled off the dark green water of the Oran channel. Every person in the group was a working Coal or early Flame fighter between thirty and fifty years old. Men and women who had learned three or four fragmentary base stances twenty years ago from an army sergeant or a village school, and who used that small measure of cultivated breath ten hours a day to pole forty-ton timber rafts against the…
