Daro Kesh asked how many people had died in the twelve beds below. Meanwhile, Nara Soth survived in the upper dome. Then, the air in the Listening Crown seemed to freeze harder than the hoarfrost on the granite flags.
By the stairwell door, bound Osen Tal flinched and looked away, expecting the fifth-realm fighter either to lash out with the crushing weight of her Crown focus or to deflect the blame onto Chief Examiner Vaska Ren who had built the array.
Nara Soth did neither.
The faint trace of dry humor vanished from her scarred face. That left the weathered lines around her mouth and eyes stark in the starlight. Her single hand remained flat on her patched knee, the thick horn callus along her thumb gleaming dully.
“Thirty-one,” Nara Soth said.
She didn’t say around thirty, and she didn’t say ask the clerks. She gave the exact integer the way Seyun gave a silver balance.
“Fourteen men and seventeen women across twenty snow seasons,” Nara continued, her voice low and fully level. “The youngest was a seventeen-year-old charcoal-burner’s son from the east fork named Joren, who died in the third winter. The oldest was a fifty-two-year-old widow named Kella from the salt-pans, whose heart gave out two autumns ago in the fourth bed from the door—the same bed where the caravan woman with the collarbone scar is lying tonight.”
