Ashaun set her jaw, braced her stone left forearm against the base of Pip’s neck, and drove the narrow edge of the bell dagger cleanly through the second mineral root beneath the lattice crown.
The root parted. Beneath the split bone of the crown, the original seed—a dense, plum-sized knot of dark, many-faceted mineral that had outlasted the towers of Falling Bells—came loose from its socket with a wet tearing sound.
Pip did not let the organ roll into the water. Moving with quick, deliberate care on its six trembling legs, Pip tucked its chin and caught the falling seed inside the opened warm pouch on its underside—the same lined hollow it had grown months ago in Bent Reed to keep an injured field mouse from freezing before dawn.
The moment the hot mineral seed touched the living lining of the pouch, the assembled memory of Azhrak surged up through Pip’s ribs in a final, blinding rush. It no longer spoke like a general commanding a line. It spoke with the ache of everything Pip itself had ever wished for since the night of the auction.
Keep me here in the warm dark, the voice pleaded, flooding the bond with vivid, heartbreakingly gentle pictures. Ysabet’s crooked right fingers uncurling smooth and painless in the sun; old Mother Suth walking back down the forest path with her flowering moss cloak green on her shoulders and her hand outstretched; the burned marsh hare standing up whole in the grass; a house with…
