Seyun walked north from the lower market gate toward the wheelwright’s house in the early-spring sunshine. He unbuttoned the top frog of his grey woollen coat and felt the mild south wind against his throat. Along the roadside ditches, the snow had melted into clear, chattering rills that flashed over the pebbles. The pale green tips of wild garlic were already pushing up through the wet oak leaves beneath the city wall.
Inside his chest, the sensation of his fully recovered spirit vein system was remarkable. For ninety days he had grown so accustomed to the subtle, protective boundary around his left collarbone and his chest bone that having the one-season lock lift felt like taking off a heavy winter splint and discovering that the room had twice as much air in it. Both Place I and Place III were physically whole again. Not raw, not inflamed, and no longer sealed shut by recovery.
He climbed the outside stair to his second-floor room above Master Orin’s yard at noon. Then, he found three letters waiting on the table beside his inkstone, delivered over the past fortnight by country post riders from neighbouring valleys.
Now that the published copies of Master Uren’s Answering Spirit vein diagrams and safety limits had circulated through the mountain schools, every ambitious Bronze and Jade fighter within fifty leagues knew two facts. First, that the young man in Oran had reached Consolidated Jade before his twenty-fourth year by answering worthy rivals. And second, that two of…
