Seyun’s left hand tightened instinctively over the canvas flap of his satchel. He felt the hard, chiseled edge of Master Uren’s gray stone tablet through the cloth. Beside him, Ilyra turned her head sharply toward the needle lattice. Meanwhile, Daro Kesh’s fingers stayed on his sword sheath throat without moving an inch toward the handle knob.
“Break it?” Seyun repeated quietly. “Master Uren hid the third section of this tablet beneath his own ribs in the abbey ruin for twenty years so the Aperture Court couldn’t complete their copy. My sister and I nearly died in Oran and the ravine keeping it out of Osen’s hands.”
“I know what Uren hid under his ribs, boy. Because I was standing ten paces from him when the roof beams fell,” Nara Soth said, her voice cutting across the cold stone chamber like a draw-knife stripping bark from an oak beam. “And I’m telling you, as the last living person who practiced the Answering Spirit vein to the fifth realm of Crown, that Uren should have taken a mason’s hammer to all three pieces of that slate before the Court ever marched up the mountain.”
From beside the stairwell door, Osen Tal let out a choked sound of disbelief. “You’re mad,” the bound steward burst out, forgetting his fear for a breath as he stared at the white-haired prisoner. “That tablet contains the complete return-path shape that Sel Oran spent his life discovering! Without it, when your channels finally fail under the winter…
