In the back corner of the southern ward room, former steward Osen Tal set down the bundle of dried gentian roots he had been tying and looked from Seyun’s face to Ilyra’s hand tightening around the shaft of her marsh-iron spear. Since Seyun and Ilyra had saved Osen from falling to his death in the Ravine of Unfinished Forms after his own Court employers cut his rope, the sixty-year-old steward had cooperated in bounded, pragmatic stages. Guiding them into the Hollow Summit’s lower supply passage, sketching the upkeep anatomy of the common test needle so Pera could be disconnected, and chopping firewood at the shepherd’s hospice without attempting to flee.
Yet even while helping them survive, a part of Osen Tal had clung to the lifelong habit of an institutional manager. Keeping one last ledger column in reserve in case a quiet settlement could still be arranged between Chief Examiner Vaska Ren and the chartered houses. Looking at Senn’s letter in Seyun’s hand—and hearing that Reth Mal had bypassed Vaska’s pillar vault entirely to drag a sixteen-year-old boy through the northern iron grate—Osen’s shoulders sagged. The gray, pinched look of a man watching his final illusion of orderly governance burn away settled over his face.
