Ashaun looked down at the narrow bell dagger tucked into her belt. Her right hand rested on the wire-wrapped hilt, and her mouth pulled sideways over her broken teeth.
“Osha’s right,” Ashaun said in her flat, rough voice. “When the coalition broke the bell forty-three years ago, the man standing next to me had a spear-hole under his collarbone he hadn’t felt since noon. The instant the shared mind snapped, his heart stopped from the shock before his knees hit the gravel. I lived because my left arm turned to stone instead of bleeding out.”
Across the cavern, young Tor—the sandy-haired pikeman who had left the patrol—sat very still on an overturned bucket, thinking of his brother down on the lake shore with his palm against the black stone.
“What if we don’t chop the rope all at once?” Chaska asked from beside Lilt’s wing-tip, where she was nursing her bound left shoulder against her knee.
Before anyone could answer, Pip walked out from beside the mouse’s ledge and stepped up to the flat slab of grey slate where Chaska had laid her chalk.
Pip did not try to push into anyone’s mind. It lowered its head so everyone could see the pale relationship-sensitive lattice of its antlers, bound near the base with dried strips of Mother Suth’s moss cloak, and the deliberate gap in the left lattice fork that it had grown in the forkwing caves to interrupt overwhelming pressure. With its thin regrown forefoot, Pip touched Suth’s little…
