Seyun looked up in surprise at Ilyra’s left hand resting across his gauze-wrapped wrist. Her dark eyes were steady, clear, and fully free of the intoxicating rush of discovery that had just swept through the underground vault.
“Don’t write that Nara Soth is alive today into your ledger yet, Seyun,” Ilyra said calmly.
“Look at the vermilion bracket, Ilyra,” Seyun said. He pointed with his chin toward the open siege roll. “Needles One and Two are explicitly marked snapped at the eye at the third and fourth watches. Needle Three—Nara Soth at the Crown realm—is marked unseated under restraint, passed to the Hollow Summit. Then she kept for continuing correction. Even the verb tense is present and nonstop.”
“And when was that present-tense verb brushed onto this page?” Ilyra asked him directly, applying the exact evidentiary standard he himself had used on Osen Tal two hours ago on the ridge.
Seyun paused, his brush still poised above the rag paper.
“It was brushed two hundred winters ago, nine nights after the Monastery of the Last Question fell,” Ilyra said, her voice firm and unsparing. “When the third Hall Master’s scribe wrote kept for continuing correction, it was the present tense for that scribe. All that verb proves is that Nara Soth survived the night of the siege and was hauled up to the Hollow Summit alive two hundred years ago.”
