Senior Steward Osen Tal opened his mouth to answer Seyun’s question with the same practiced clerk hall defense he had used over the charcoal fire bowl in his quarters at White Heron Hall. The familiar, measured speech about how the northern valleys held ten thousand households, how old Crown violence would level the river towns if the mountain seal ever slipped, and how every great public work needed a few unrecorded names in the mortar.
The first three words actually formed on Osen’s tongue. Then his eyes shifted past Seyun’s shoulder toward the stone well-house thirty feet away. There, Daro Kesh had just come up the garden path with his arm around nineteen-year-old Kes’s shoulder while seventeen-year-old Bren and fifteen-year-old Tella argued cheerfully over whether Kes’s low slanted should be named the Turnip-Row Cut or the Fifth-Rib Rebound.
In the lantern-lit stillness of that small, leaking compound—where a teacher had just bowed to a nineteen-year-old quarryman’s son rather than let the boy scar his chest for a city stamp—Osen Tal’s rehearsed speech died in his throat. He tried a second time to start the sentence about necessary sacrifices. Then he found that he couldn’t make the defense sound acceptable even to himself.
