“How did a sect founder and the woman who knocked him into the mud live in the same valley for thirty-one winters without their students killing each other?” Daro Kesh asked from beside the stairwell door, genuinely wanting to know how such an arrangement had worked in practice.
“By keeping the accounts in the open where every novice could read them,” Nara Soth answered right away.
On the third stair tread, Seyun’s head came up slightly at the phrase, his bookkeeper’s ear catching the exact practical gearwork of the founder’s ethic.
“I refused to live inside his abbey walls,” Nara said. Her dark eyes looked past the thirty-six iron needles as if she were looking across the wooded gorge below the peak. “If you sleep under a man’s roof, eat from his kitchen pot every night, and let his stewards wash your shirts, your blade starts pulling its punches before the first frost. I built a stone cabin on the opposite ridge above the torrent—three miles across the gorge from the Monastery of the Last Question.”
“The old watchtower ruin on the western spur,” Ilyra murmured. She remembered the broken stone foundation they had passed above the rope bridge on their climb.
