Edris drew a slow, shallow breath that pulled at the linen waist-band holding his left hip splint.
“The apparatus beneath the cage was never meant to destroy affection,” Edris said, looking back up from the crushed copper coils to Pip’s amber eyes. “When a man lies in a marsh fever, he cries out for strangers and fights the physician who brings him cold water. A newly woken seed takes impressions from the first hands that feed it, before it can remember its own nature. The severing coils would only have cooled that fever for an hour so you could recognize who you were without a harness needle’s worth of kitchen habits standing in the way.”
Osha stepped forward from the third limestone step, her boots splashing softly in the warm brine. She did not raise her voice. Instead, she unfastened the oilskin wrap from her satchel, took out the water-stained leather notebook they had lifted from the stone cairn beside the Quiet Spring, and knelt on one knee at Edris’s uninjured right side.
“You told me in the upper camp that my father’s earlier trial failed because the beast wasn’t a true seed,” Osha said quietly. “You told yourself he left the valley with it afterward.”
