When Osen Tal spoke the words on one condition, Ilyra’s hand shifted half an inch on her spear shaft and Daro Kesh’s shoulders squared in the doorway. Men caught with thirty-eight secret deaths in their ledgers usually bargained for their own skins—for a horse at the crossroads, a burned confession, or a promise not to hand them over to the families of the dead. Yet Seyun watched the pulse at the base of the fifty-year-old steward’s throat. Then, the rhythm was neither wild nor pleading.
“Don’t mistake me for a penitent, Master Seyun,” Osen said. He looked squarely at the three of them in turn. “I’m not going to kneel on this floor and cry over the names Archivist Vel read out last night. I’m not going to pretend I was tricked by superior officers. I knew what the bronze floor conductors in the lower shrine did to an unfinished spirit vein after six months of load. I signed the transfer orders anyway.”
By the table, Archivist Vel’s hand trembled slightly over the six silver-birch leaves. “Aven was seventeen years old, Osen. His mother still sweeps the steps of the herb-drying shed in Oran every morning waiting for word of his clerkship.”
