For two breaths after Ilyra finished speaking, Seyun simply looked at her across the lamplit table. He felt the cool, steady hum beneath his left collarbone balance the heavier, grounded iron of Daro Kesh’s mark beneath his right.
For the past ten days, a quiet, silent dread had lived at the back of his mind. That the Answering Spirit vein was a fragile glass trick that survived only so long as his rival didn’t look too closely at the machinery. That full honesty would shatter the bond on the spot. Instead, laying every ugly motive and clockwork limit bare on the oak table had done the exact opposite. Stripped of half-truths and protective excuses, the real philosophical divide between them—her fierce determination to purge and redeem the chartered institutions from within, against his conviction that an independent, unbought foundation outside the Court’s seals was the only incorruptible check on power—stood out cleaner and stronger than ever.
“Before you close that book, however,” Ilyra said, her voice returning to the crisp, practical care of an officer drafting a field compact, “we’re going to write down the terms under which this alliance and this rivalry operate from tonight forward. Fetch your inkstone from the dresser.”
