In the limewashed check room, the silence stretched so taut that the clink of a glass pestle in the front shop sounded like a stone dropped down a dry well.
Mina didn’t say a word. With the quiet, unblinking discipline of a sister who had already delivered her warning the day before and refused to shield her brother from the reckoning she had predicted, she dipped a clean linen swab into the warm water basin and began gently loosening the dried willow-bark dressing from Seyun’s left wrist. That kept her head bowed out of the line of sight between the two principals.
Seyun sat upright on the oak check table with his shirt collar still unfastened across both silver marks. He didn’t pull the cloth closed, and he didn’t insult Ilyra’s intelligence by pretending not to understand her question.
“Yes,” Seyun said. “Before he spoke his vow, he read the entire thirty-page notebook I copied from the stone—including the inner sections from the lower half. And right away after the second mark opened beneath my right collarbone at noon, I unbuttoned my collar and told him every single clockwork rule and vulnerability clause aloud, without leaving anything out.”
Across the narrow room, Ilyra stood beside her racked spear-case with her left hand resting at her belt and her injured right arm tucked inside its clean white linen sling. Her face was not flushed with tavern anger. It held the cold, level, devastating composure that made her the sharpest junior officer…
