For five long breaths after Hall Mistress Soran opened her eyes, the ruined pilgrim shelter remained so still that Seyun could hear the dry ticking of cooling charcoal inside Mina’s tiny fire bowl. Across the hearth-stone, Soran’s gloved fingers rested on the open sheepskin page where Steward Osen Tal had recorded the weight of the six lead-lined coffins hauled up the Hollow Summit twenty winters ago.
Slowly, deliberately, Soran closed the sheepskin ledger and handed it back across the coals to Osen. Her movement contained neither the explosive fury Ilyra had shown a moment earlier nor the slumped defeat of someone whose past had been hollowed out. Instead, she held her spine with the exact, straight-line stillness of a spear teacher standing on a wet river piling.
“When a student discovers that an opponent’s opening salute hidden a hidden blade,” Soran said, her voice clear and low in the lantern beam, “the student’s first impulse is always to declare that the entire exchange was false from the first step. It’s an understandable impulse, because it simplifies the memory. If everything Vaska Ren did that night in the northern gallery was a dramatic lie, then I owe him no respect. My own twenty years of patience were merely the gullibility of a fool.”
