For a full minute after Seyun finished reading the four laws on the back flyleaf, Ilyra stood over the open Account Book without speaking. Her dark eyes moved slowly down the inked columns—checking the wording of the seven-dawn echo, the realm ceiling, the ninety-day turning to stone on death, and the twenty-percent endurance loss on reconciliation against the twenty-two-pound limestone tablet sitting on the lower shelf of the oak dresser.
She finally looked up. Then, the expression on her face was not what Seyun had expected.
She didn’t look angry about the ninety-day turning to stone clause, nor did she look insulted by the realm ceiling or the four-silver marsh iron math on the ninth leaf. In fact, a warrior who had grown up inside the hard, unsentimental discipline of White Heron Hall understood tactical logistics better than anyone in Oran. The knowledge that Seyun had spent his last four silver pieces on her spear iron partly. That was because her Bronze breakthrough would pull him into Flame seven days later struck her less as a backstabbing than as a piece of ruthless, desperate road arithmetic that he should simply have admitted on the barge.
What held her eyes dark and tight was something much quieter, and much closer to the bone.
