The horn-handled skinning knife slid through the waxed linen thread of the coat’s inner shoulder pad with a dry, distinct rasp. Nobody in the burial house courtyard moved. By the wagon shed thirty paces away, the two caravan guards watched with their thumbs hooked over their axe-spear shafts, while behind the barred oak shutter of the shed itself, a pale face pressed close to the narrow air-flow slit. Custodian Halen had refused breakfast an hour earlier, insisting that a country logistics clerk of the Aperture Court couldn’t be detained by a junior White Heron escort once they reached Oran’s town gates. As Daro Kesh peeled back the blood-stiffened wool lining, Halen’s fingers gripped the lower edge of the wooden louver until his knuckles turned the color of river chalk.
From between the quilted horsehair padding and the outer wool, Daro drew out a folded rectangle of thin, yellow-oiled Court parchment. Even at four paces, Seyun recognized the waterproof animal fat treatment used by the Court’s field test judges to keep dispatches readable through mountain sleet and marsh damp. A crimson wax impression—stamped with the nested ring of the pale sky-slit—held the lower fold shut. Even so, the seal had been cracked once and re-pressed with a warm thumb.
