Ysabet drew the folded length of Suth’s old cloak from the top of her pack.
At the Glassroot clearing, when the old woman had died, the living moss woven through the grey wool had flowered once and dried into ordinary, soft-fibred cloth. Ysabet laid a corner of it across her knee. Because she could not close her burned right palm around a blade handle without tearing the fresh blister over her bent fourth and fifth fingers, she held the hem down with her boot heel and sliced three long, narrow strips with her belt knife in her left hand.
Pip flinched when she lifted the first strip toward its head.
Its two amber eyes rolled toward the cloth, and its six legs shifted sideways against the cistern stones, ready to bolt or brace. Through the bond came a sharp, hot confusion: the glare of aligned observatory lenses, hands reaching out in reverence to demand a miracle, and the sudden crack when the smallest glass had shattered against its brow.
“Look at it,” Ysabet murmured. She did not push the cloth onto the antlers. She laid the strip flat across her left wrist and waited, letting out the slow, measured breath she had practiced beside the shellhorn mother in the caravan.
