For two heartbeats at the edge of the Upper Spear Court, Ilyra stood frozen between twenty winters of loyalty to the woman who had raised her and the iron weight of the command she had just been given. A single tear cut a clean track through the grey granite dust and white birch ash on her cheek, freezing before it reached her jaw.
Then Daro Kesh laid his gauntleted left hand briefly against the shaft of Ilyra’s spear. “She’s buying the valley people the gorge road, White Heron,” Daro said quietly, his voice stripped of all courtyard arrogance as he looked toward the river of three hundred crimson torches dropping the northern pass. “If we stand here and die on the flat stone slabs with her, Vaska Ren gets the stone tablet, the Oran receipts. The map back before breakfast.”
Through the Place I bond in her left collarbone, Ilyra felt Seyun’s steady, unbending hand touch her elbow. His own palms wrapped in blood-and-soot-stained linen from the clerk hall coals. His dark eyes carried the quiet promise that not a single coin of what Hall Mistress Soran was paying tonight would be left uncollected.
Ilyra drew a single, deep breath, brought the fist of her right hand against her breastbone in the final salute of a White Heron first student. Then she turned toward the archive back gate.
