Seyun stood on the western chalk mark with his plain ash staff held diagonally across his hip. He looked across the ten paces of sunlit gravel at Daro Kesh and felt the contrast between this morning and every formal match they had ever fought before.
Seven months ago, when they had first crossed weapons in the smoky lamp-light of Oran’s river-ward wrestling lodge during that earlier contest, Master Uren’s cracked limestone tablet had hung twenty feet above their heads inside a locked brass cage, with a hundred-breath sand-glass draining on the judges’ table and masked Aperture Court agents watching from the rafters. Back then, Daro had been fighting in desperation to buy back his revoked teaching license from the people who had closed his school. Seyun had been fighting to keep the only inheritance that made his inward channels work.
Four months after that, when they had stood opposite each other on the frosty flat stone slabs of the northern seal court during that earlier ordeal for Seyun’s Early Jade breakthrough test, the shadow of the Twelfth Night had hung over every breath. Twelve freed testers waiting in the lower hospice, Mina and Halin standing at the edge of the tiles as living anchors for Seyun’s responsive purpose, and the dropping pale blade ring counting down the hours on the ridge above.
