Ilyra didn’t speak when Seyun finished reading the ninth page. Her left hand remained resting on the corner post of the check table, her thumb tracing the grain of the scrubbed oak. Meanwhile, she waited for him to turn to the back of the book.
With the side of his bandaged right wrist, Seyun flipped past the middle leaves of the Account Book until he reached the heavy rag-paper flyleaf glued inside the back leather cover.
Here, drawn in the same waterproof carbon ink he had used to transcribe the thirty-page notebook for Daro Kesh two nights ago, sat the complete clockwork table of the Answering Spirit vein. Copied word for word from the lower half of Master Uren’s limestone slab.
“Yesterday afternoon in the dressing nook at the Old Wrestling Lodge,” Seyun said, tilting the open back cover toward her so the yellow lamplight fell squarely across the four numbered columns, “you asked me what the silver mark beneath my left collarbone actually did. I told you that it needed a genuine mutual dispute to open my occluded chest gate, that it took nothing from your own dantian. That your breakthrough to Bronze at the abbey had echoed across the bond seven dawns later to help me reach Flame.”
