Seyun stood beside the stone well curb. Meanwhile, the boy’s mother tucked the wooden barrel hoop safely under the visitor bench. He remembered the last time a child had wandered into the middle of a formal contest between him and Daro Kesh.
In that earlier reckoning, on the ninety-ninth breath of their match in Oran’s river-ward wrestling lodge, a rotten ceiling beam had cracked under the shaking of their Bronze and Flame clashes, threatening to drop half a ton of timber onto a tavern-keeper’s child near the rope ring. Daro had abandoned the undefended brass cage holding the Balance tablet at Breath 99 to catch the falling beam on his shoulder while Seyun used his Flame mantle to deflect the splinters. Afterward, because the tournament judges were corrupt Aperture Court agents looking for an excuse to disqualify both of them, Seyun had formally conceded the hundred-breath prize on the spot and handed Daro the stone tablet—turning Daro’s rescue of a bystander into the deciding score of the match.
That had been the right choice inside a rigged wrestling lodge. Just then, a secret inheritance and a man’s livelihood were being held hostage by court guards.
Here in the sunlit garden court of the Black-Roof School, however, nobody was holding a hostage, and neither man needed to turn ordinary human decency into a dramatic gesture of forfeiture.
