In the eleventh week of the winter season, with only six dawns leftover in his ninety-day unassisted lock, Seyun walked out of Oran’s south river gate alongside Ilyra and her loaded pack pony. She took the low dyke road toward the reed-marsh settlement where caravan driver Pel had lived.
The morning was cold and bright, the frozen cattail marshes stretching out on either side of the raised gravel raised stone road like fields of pale bronze spears under the winter sun. Seyun walked side by side with the pack pony’s lead rope between them. He and Ilyra fell naturally into the unrushed, companionable rhythm they had found in the hospice garden after closing Place I.
Eight months ago, when they had first walked this marsh road as escort to Osen Tal’s punitive grain caravan during that first autumn march, every step had been weighted with suspicion, hidden fire spirits. The approaching ambush that took Pel’s life and triggered Ilyra’s first Bronze breakthrough. Today, no silver mark linked their collarbones, and neither of them was measuring the other’s breath. Over the first three miles, they argued briskly over whether twelve-year-old spear new students should learn the close-range shaft-choke before or after the standard long-point ward. Disagreeing as sharply as ever, and enjoying every word of it because nothing in their spirit veins was trying to turn the conversation into a training harvest.
