For a long moment, nobody in the schoolroom spoke. Outside in the yard, seventeen-year-old Bren and fifteen-year-old Tella could be heard drawing water from the well and stacking split birch by the kitchen shed, their boots crunching on the thawing gravel. Inside, Seyun rose from the hearthstones, picked up Osen Tal’s taken away personal notebook from the pine table. Then he walked over to stand four paces in front of the hobbled steward.
“In the back pages of your notebook, Steward Osen,” Seyun said, opening the oilskin cover to a column of dates marked with small charcoal crescents, “every twenty-eighth day of the lunar cycle is underlined twice beside a supply order for forty pounds of sweet reed-ash, twelve gallons of refined stone oil, and six pairs of pigskin glazier’s gloves. Why does a deep-rock seal-station need glazier’s gloves and lamp oil on the exact same night every month?”
Osen Tal looked down at the bound hemp cord between his ankles, then up at Seyun, Ilyra, and Daro. Over the past twenty-four hours—watching Seyun read the hidden strain in Daro’s elbow, watching Kes turn a Bronze blade by dropping his breath below a scarred rib, and hearing Archivist Vel read out the names of thirty-eight broken youths—something in the steward’s rigid office certainty had shifted. He hadn’t become their convert, nor had he ceased to fear what lay beneath the mountain. But he knew beyond doubt that the people standing before him were neither looters nor sect politicians.
