For a long moment after Daro Kesh finished speaking, the only sound in the second-floor room was the rhythmic scrape-thump of the currier’s iron fleshing-knives working the wet hides in the yard below.
Seyun stood by the casement window with his bandaged forearms level across his waist. He didn’t rush to defend Master Uren’s stone, and he didn’t offer the glib, circular justifications that sect scholars used when someone questioned their founder’s doctrine. Instead, he let Daro’s words sit in the room and weighed them the way he weighed a sack of storehouse salt. Checking whether the tare was honest.
“You’re right about the temptation,” Seyun said quietly.
Daro’s grey eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch. He had braced himself for an argument. He hadn’t expected an immediate admission.
“Four days ago on the ferry deck at Ash Reed,” Seyun said, his voice steady and unrushed in the bright morning room, “I gave Ilyra forty pounds of prime marsh iron that I had bought with my own silver so she could forge a new spear and reach Bronze before the Court’s pursuit caught us. Telling myself I was helping an ally against Elder Meren was easy. Admitting in my own ledger that half my motive was to make sure she reached Bronze so the seven-dawn echo would pull me into Flame—that was harder. And yesterday in the dressing nook before our bout, my own sister told me to my face that hiding the full dependency terms from Ilyra was…
