Midnight on the first pine ridge brought a brief thinning of the snowfall. He showed the jagged black dark shape of the Hollow Summit looming above them like an iron anvil against the stars. In the narrow hollow behind the uprooted firs, Ilyra stood with her weight settled over her front boot and her hand gripped tight around the ash shaft of her marsh-iron spear, her torn right shoulder ignored as she faced Daro Kesh across the foot of Senn’s litter.
Both of them were sworn to Seyun’s chest—Place I beneath his left collarbone, Place II beneath his right—and both had bled within the last two hours to bring these five people out of the Aperture Court’s vault. Yet they looked down at the carpenter struggling for breath under Mina’s reed-ash compress. Then, their respective truths collided along the exact fault line that had defined their lives.
“You’re talking about carrying a freed man back into an Aperture Court check cellar and handing him over to the judge who wired him to a pillar for two years,” Ilyra said. Her voice low and shook with the disciplined heat of White Heron Hall.
“I’m talking about keeping air inside his lungs until morning,” Daro answered at the exact same volume.
