The small stone room at the end of the back passage had been built to keep winter turnips from freezing, its thick granite walls separated from the main ward by twenty feet of flat stone slab hall and a barred oak door. Two independent mountain guards from West Scree stood outside with grounded spears. Mina lifted the iron bar. Then, Seyun walked down the passage with his left arm strapped in its canvas sling and stood just outside the threshold. Not to taunt a defeated enemy, but to make sure the prisoner didn’t kick the medicine tray out of his sister’s hands.
Former Assistant Examiner Reth Mal sat on a narrow plank bench bolted to the rear wall. Even stripped of his pale Court sash and confined in a turnip cellar, he held his spine with the rigid, unbending certainty that had driven him to cancel Vaska Ren’s promise at the Hollow Summit and drag sixteen-year-old Halin beneath the northern blade ring. His right wrist—snapped by Nara Soth’s bare hand. Just then, he lunged at Halin with a knife—was bound in a split alder-bark cradle. The entire outer aspect of his weapon arm remained shrunken and gray-violet where the Measure had driven a pale needle through his flesh at the lower shrine to turn him into a fixed human anchor.
