The dispatch office clock on the wall outside the forge shop struck a quarter past three.
It wasn’t a great town bell like the ones that hung in the frozen towers on the Star tower ridge. It was a modest brass movement in a pine case, the kind of control valve used by rail conductors to mark freight transfers. The single brass hammer struck the small chime with a clear, lonely note that cut through the hiss of the steam chimney pipes, ringing once, twice, and dying away into the damp air of the forge.
At the sound of that single chime, Doma Reel’s eyelids snapped wide open.
Her gray eyes didn’t wander toward the soot-blackened ceiling timbers, nor did they look at the bloody linen towels resting in Brant Sallow’s trembling hands. Her pupils, suddenly dark and clear in the green light of the copper lantern, locked directly onto Len Vey’s face.
There was no confusion in that gaze. There was no delirium, no fading memory of summer currants, and no terror of the dark. For one packed second, all the unbending determination of her fifty-two years. The fierce, maternal power that had defied Chancellor Morn’s court guards, fed two thousand starving refugees. Then they held twelve tons of collapsing timber on a single shoulder. Blazed in her eyes with total clarity.
