The three taps died away into the high mountain wind.
“You heard it,” Ysabet said, keeping her voice level and her staff planted on the granite. “It didn’t refuse your stone, Precentor. It asked for time to clear its head before touching another dead century. One hour by the sundial, and we come back to the table.”
Edris stared down at Pip’s raised foreleg. For a second, something like real pain crossed the older man’s face—not malice, but the baffled frustration of a surgeon watching an ignorant country woman pull a feverish child away from the operating table because the child cried at the sight of the lancet.
“An hour,” Edris murmured, looking from Pip’s scarred, bleeding jaw to the rough hemp lashings on Chaska’s boots and the gray slate dust crusted on Ysabet’s coat. “An hour to let your fear soak back into its mind through that tether you call a bond. Look at its mouth, Mistress Orre. Look at how it flinches at the wind. Within two weeks of leaving my offer in Bent Reed, it has had its teeth crushed by tree roots and its tongue burned out by carrion birds on a broken road, while you teach it to tap the floor like a turnspit dog begging for kitchen scraps.”
