The single dry laugh didn’t turn Nara Soth into a kindly grandmother, nor did it erase the three hundred years of hard, unsentimental skepticism carved into her face. The echo faded from the dressed granite dome. Then, her dark eyes were just as sharp and unbending as before.
Yet the air in the Listening Crown had cleared in the way Seyun understood best. The fog of false politeness and unstated assumptions was gone. That left the exact shape of their disagreement visible on the stone between them.
“At least you don’t whine when someone challenges your intentions, boy,” Nara Soth said, resting her scarred right forearm across her knee as she looked from Seyun to Ilyra and Daro. “For twenty winters I have listened to Vaska Ren and his stewards come up those stairs and explain to me with tearful solemnity that they’re good men forced by tragic necessity to wire teenagers into a floor. Hearing someone stand on two feet, admit there’s a risk in what he carries, and state his terms plainly is almost worth the draft coming up the stairwell.”
Seyun slid Master Uren’s stone tablet carefully back into his canvas satchel and buckled the strap with his bandaged left hand. “We don’t need to agree on what happens to the Answering Spirit vein fifty winters from now to agree on what needs to happen before morning,” he said.
