Len didn’t drop his right hand. The skin of his knuckles was scraped raw from the iron ladder in the under-road drain, stained with black machine grease and the yellow dust of crushed sulfur. But his fingers remained steady. He could feel forty pairs of eyes boring into him through the smoke. He measured the gap between his boots and the oak threshold. Behind him, the cold cellar boards rattled slightly as Halden Pell shifted his weight on the straw, scared of every breath taken on the stone steps.
“Twelve years ago,” Len said, his voice dropping into the quiet, steady pace his father had used when explaining the tension limits of a mid-air cable to apprentice road-builders, “Chancellor Ves Morn stood in the country council chamber and told the seven ward delegates that an emergency needed exceptional arithmetic. He told them that an invading war engine was thirty miles from the border. He told them that to keep the sky shield energized, some citizens would have to carry an unsealed account. That some claimants would have to surrender their milestones for the common defense.”
A carter shifted his boots in the mud, spitting into the melted rock waste. “We know what he said, boy. We lived it.”
