The man who stepped across the threshold of the tester chamber was twenty years younger than Vaska Ren, with high, unscarred cheekbones, cold gray eyes, and silver-trimmed white trial cuffs that bore not a single speck of road mud despite the mountain climb.
Seyun felt the newcomer’s training before the official spoke a word.
He was Jade—not the deep, patient, thirty-year late Jade of Vaska Ren that settled over a room like an invisible lens. But a hard, driving, linear Early-to-Middle Jade that pressed straight down the center aisle like a sharpened iron wedge. At his hip hung a long, silver-mounted ritual enforcement blade whose sword sheath hummed with the faint, clear deep ring of a Court array tuning-fork.
“Assistant Examiner Reth Mal,” Vaska Ren said quietly from beside Bed Three. He stepped forward half a pace into the aisle with his hands empty at his sides. “You left the northern staging post without a summons. And you have brought armed enforcement guards past the lower safe hall bell into the tester ward.”
Reth Mal didn’t bow to his superior’s twenty years of seniority. He stopped three paces inside the vault door, his cold eyes sweeping rapidly across the room. From Osen Tal standing unbound without his steward’s badge, to Daro Kesh and Ilyra holding naked steel and marsh-iron, to Seyun sitting by the stove with bandaged palms and a stitched thigh, and finally to Bed Two. Where the straw mattress lay empty and Pera stood beside Bed One in…
