The pine spark cooled to a black fleck of soot before it cleared the top of the courtyard wall. Seyun followed it with his eyes up toward the pale, unblinking rent of the northern sky-slit, then looked back across the fire bowl at Bel Sar.
“What happens the winter after next,” Seyun asked evenly, “when a wealthy patron from the river cities brings another favored nephew to Ash Reed with an unstable borrowed spirit in his chest, and Tor Ves needs the inner court to sign the certificate so the sect keeps its grain tax exemption?”
“Tell me something, Keeper Bel,” Seyun said. He leaned his forearms on his knees as the red pine coals settled lower in the iron basket. “Where is Elder Hesh sleeping tonight?”
Bel shifted his heavy boots in the frost. “Still in the eastern scripture pavilion with a wooden bar across the outer shutters, by Tor Ves’s order. He gets three hot meals a day and his charcoal fire bowl. Tor lets two new students bring him old pulse scrolls to copy. But he isn’t allowed on the teaching terrace.”
“Why did Tor put the bar on Elder Hesh’s shutters?” Seyun asked quietly.
Bel’s bushy eyebrows twitched once, though he said nothing.
