Nara Soth didn’t answer right away. Twenty years of having Heaven’s Measure routed through her spine on the Hollow Summit had frayed portions of her memory like moth-eaten wool. She refused to invent a pretty story to satisfy a grieving mother. She stood in silence under the pine boughs for nearly a full minute, her single right hand resting still on the worn ash of her walking staff. Meanwhile, her mind sifted through the dim, stone-walled halls of the abbey’s final winter.
She didn’t remember Aven’s base stance, or which rank he had held in the outer bunkhouse, or how his pulse had sounded. Just then, the elders brought the silver wire into Chamber Four.
As Nara Soth spoke of the lower kitchen hall outside the eastern retaining wall three weeks before the winter snow closed the pass. Describing the nineteen-year-old boy from the river reeds with the cowlick over his left ear, the mud dried on the hem of his robe from the wet stairs. The squat red-clay kettle with the brass wire twist around its cracked spout. Seyun watched Mother Renn’s face transform in the quiet pine shade.
For twenty years, whenever anyone from the sects had whispered about the fall of the Balance abbey, the dead students had been described as either tragic victims of a dark heresy or nameless zealots who perished in a forbidden ritual. Even Archivist Vel’s heroic salvage beneath White Heron Hall had only been able to rescue Aven’s name, his age. The…
