For three breaths after Marta pointed up at the bare timber laths of her cottage roof, no one in the burial-house courtyard spoke. The late-morning wind off the canal weir flapped the corner of the rotting sailcloth patch nailed over the rafters. That made a dry, hollow clap above the frame stands where Pel lay shrouded in canvas.
Custodian Halen was the first to recover his tongue. He took a hasty step backward toward the lead barley wagon. He tucked the small leather pouch with its two silver coins back into his sash as if the widow had threatened to pick his pocket. “You hear that, witnesses?” Halen called out in a shrill, legalistic voice. He looked around at the two guard post pike-guards. “The woman refuses the lawful two-silver release and demands private upkeep from an outer clerk who has just confessed to causing the highway engagement! Under the Fourth Statute of Convoy Indemnity, when an escort member admits personal fault in a public square, the First Sub-Vault is wholly discharged of further debt!”
Neither Seyun nor Ilyra looked at the Court official.
Ilyra grounded her seven-foot ashwood spear upright in the gravel beside Pel’s frame stand and unfastened the small leather coin-pouch that hung behind her sword-frog—her personal road-allowance from White Heron Hall. She didn’t toss it or hold it out at arm’s length as Halen had done. She walked up the two flat river-slate steps onto the porch. She laid the pouch quietly on the stone window-ledge…
