Osha did not hide behind the sulfur boulders when the morning horn blew. She smoothed the front of her frayed gray scholar’s coat, held Amren’s oilskin-wrapped expedition journal in both hands against her breastbone, and walked straight down the middle of the gravel road toward the timber barricade.
Corporal Marek saw her ten paces out and lowered his pike across the gap—then recognized the face from the observatory dispatches and shouted for the officer of the watch. Within two minutes Osha was escorted between two guards past the turning four-mule windlass and into the command pavilion, while thirty yards to the north, unseen in the steam of the supply trench, Ashaun slid down behind the canvas wall of the infirmary tent.
Inside the pavilion, Edris dismissed the guards at once. He stood behind his worktable with an unlit lamp beside his elbow, looking at Osha’s mud-caked hem and the dark hollows under her eyes with a mixture of sorrow and triumph.
“Osha,” he said softly, stepping around the table with one hand half-extended, as if she were still a nineteen-year-old novice coming late to the library in winter. “You look half-starved. Sit down by the brazier—there is hot barley water on the grate.”
