Ashaun did not flinch when Pip leaned its heavy, trembling head against her leg. She kept her functional right hand steady on its neck plate and breathed in slow, deep counts of four—in through the nose, out through the broken teeth—until the wet rattle in Pip’s chest eased and its six feet stopped scraping the granite.
“She didn’t tell him to conquer the valley,” Chaska said from the north parapet, her hand resting on Lilt’s folded wing. “She didn’t give him a speech about empires at all. She just wanted five more minutes for the carts to clear the planks.”
“And her own captain killed her for it,” Edris said from across the stone table. There was no triumph in his voice, only a deep, worn sadness that sounded wholly genuine. “My mother died at a border tollgate during the winter fever with a basket of willow-bark medicine in her arms, because two local bailiffs could not agree whose wax stamp belonged on her road pass. My father carried a pike for seventeen years under three different dukes who burned the same five villages back and forth every autumn. Theru died because one commander valued a timber line over eighty farmers. Look at the second stone, Mistress Orre. See what Azhrak actually built out of that grief.”
