The golden light from the aligned lenses washed outward across the flagstones, carrying the pull of White Fen’s shared-will bond to every living thing on the plateau.
Near the north parapet, Lilt reared back on her hind legs with a terrified hiss, her wide gliding wings flaring halfway open in the wind before Chaska threw both arms around the sandray’s neck and dragged her head down behind the low stone wall, pressing her own wool cap over Lilt’s eyes so the glare wouldn’t send her bolting off the cliff. Inside Chaska’s pack, the little mouse scratched once against the lid of its wooden box and went still.
Ten paces from the central table, the wave hit Ysabet straight through her bond with Pip.
It did not feel like the black bone spear in Bent Reed, and it did not feel like an iron chain around the throat. That was what made it so dangerous. It felt like coming in out of a freezing salt-marsh gale at midnight into a warm kitchen where someone else had already stacked the dry peat, boiled the kettle, mended the roof, and paid the winter rent. The ten thousand linked minds of White Fen reached up through Pip’s straining nerves into Ysabet’s chest, murmuring a single, gentle invitation: Put down the load. Stop carrying the cold by yourself. Let the whole body hold what hurts.
