A brass chime rang out across the Central Dragon-Vein Plaza as the trial entered its forty-eighth hour.
The heat on Day 43 felt like a blacksmith’s shop at high noon. Waves of yellow sulfur fumes rolled off three hundred bronze platforms, stinging eyes and parching throats. Most furnace boys looked half-dead, their tunics soaked in sweat and their arms trembling on the bellow handles.
On Platform Eighty-Four, Kaelen Vance had not moved an inch.
His straw hat covered his eyes. His boots rested on an overturned iron bucket. A light breeze stirred the hem of his gray linen apron while he dozed through the afternoon. Beside him, Linnea carefully tended her slow-burning flame, looking entirely relaxed.
“Look at that clown,” an outer disciple sneered from the upper gallery. “Two full days, and he hasn’t even lit his burner.”
“He’s just an ash-boy who got lucky in the preliminary rounds,” another voice agreed. “Grandmaster Volkov will have him whipped the moment the gong sounds.”
People spend too much energy worrying about other people’s cauldrons, Kaelen thought drowsily.
If they spent half that effort watching their own dampers, their pills wouldn’t smell like burnt porridge.
