Getting forty-eight iron spikes out of the stone beams took until noon, and getting the twelve giant moths ready to trust the air took everything left in the provision sack.
Once the last pin came free on the eastern truss, the great insects did not leap toward the roof doors. For weeks every small shift of their shoulders had meant a fresh tear of iron against living vein. They clung to the stone corbels with cramped legs, their wings hanging crooked and stiff, shivering violently as they tried to pump warm blood back into dried spar-tubes.
Osha and the young worker Reed carried shallow wooden dough-troughs up to the stone coping and poured out two of Gevren’s jars of mineral honey mixed with crushed sweet-spar and warm water. The smell—rich with dark orchard iron, wild plum, and clean limestone dust—drifted along the rafters.
The moths’ feathered antennae lifted and quivered toward the troughs, yet not one of them uncoiled its tongue to drink. Whenever Reed or Tomas pushed a wooden dish within reach of their heads, the insects flinched back against the granite, clicking their foot claws and folding their mouthparts tighter beneath their chin wool. Everything that had come near them in human hands since autumn had carried grease, augers, or smoke.
