Twenty minutes into the hour, Pip began to click in its sleep.
It was not the deep, bronze-struck vibration of the war-seed or the three clear flute-tones of its healed ridge. It was a tiny, dry, rapid rattle from the back of its throat—like an empty tin kettle bouncing on a cold iron grate when the peat fire goes out.
Ysabet turned her head against the petrified root and looked inside the hollow.
In the dark, Pip’s six legs were drawn up tight against its belly, its nose tucked under its front ankle. For the first time since they had climbed down into the Wild Cradle, there were no spears, burning bridges, or marching battalions coming through the open bond. Azhrak’s hundred-year treasury had gone completely silent while the creature slept.
What drifted across the link instead were small, cramped fragments from Pip’s own first week of life.
Ysabet did not pry into the dream or try to steer it with soothing thoughts; she simply sat still with her left hand resting on the smooth stone lip of the hollow and received whatever spilled over.
There was the sour, briny smell of old haddock scales and wet pine slats pressing two inches above a single sore eye. There was the heavy, shaking thud of carters’ boots stopping in the mud outside Darr’s auction ground at Bent Reed. Huge, booming blurs of human voices dropped down through the cracks between the boards, none of the words clear except the scorn in…
