The boy Tavin turned on his heel and sprinted up the stepped terrace path, his bare ankles flashing above scuffed hide shoes as he took the dark grey rock risers two at a time. Kezra Venn watched him go. Her heart hammered against her ribs with sudden, choking intensity that made the cold mountain air feel thick and heavy in her throat. For eighteen months, Davren had existed in her mind as an absence. A broken mark on an upland road verge, a forged signed name on a Saltglass brass token, an ache behind Maud’s quiet eyes at the pottery wheel. Now he was two hundred paces away, behind the weathered larch door of a stone tool house.
She took half a step forward. Her boot already lifted toward the first riser. But before her sole touched the stone, Paxa Sel stepped squarely into her path.
The healer didn’t shout, but she planted her heels with the immobility of an oak stake driven into river gravel and set two firm, calloused fingers directly against the hollow of Kezra’s left collarbone. The contact was neither gentle nor violent. It was the total, unbending pressure of a clinician asserting legal power over an overdrawn body. Paxa’s grey eyes were cool, steady. Then he entirely unimpressed by the closeness of the tool house.
