Seyun held the folded linen charter out toward Chief Examiner Vaska Ren and set it back down on the edge of the clerk’s desk beside the spiral stair—unopened and unsigned.
“We’re not signing your commission, Judge,” Seyun said. His voice was calm and clear in the four-beat hum of the vault. “Master Uren’s stone tablet stays in my bag, Osen Tal’s red register stays in my sister’s hands. We’re not becoming the second generation of wardens for your cellar.”
Beside the second bed, Mina tucked the oilskin-wrapped red register securely into the front pocket of her canvas medicine satchel. Then she pulled the buckle tight.
“My wrists have four days left on Magistrate Korr’s fourteen-day ban,” Mina said evenly to the late-Jade judge. “I can wait four days for the seal to wear off on its own without trading twelve people’s veins for your storehouse key.”
At the left of the door, Ilyra allowed herself a brief, sharp smile. “And if I wanted a heated courtyard paid for by people chained in a basement, Judge, I could have stayed in my cousin Seren’s house in Oran and saved myself the walk up the mountain.”
“Same for the Black-Roof inner hall,” Daro Kesh added flatly from the right-hand wall. “You’re offering us the exact cage all four of us already walked out of.”
