Senior Elder Tor Ves stood beside the gatehouse without the two ritual attendants who had flanked him on the upper terrace that morning. He wore his dark green office robe, the cuffs slightly dusty from the storehouse stairs. Between the shafts of the wooden handcart sat two slatted pine crates containing sixteen sealed clay pot jars. Their necks were bound in oiled hemp cloth and stamped with the storehouse wax of three in a row harvest seasons.
Seyun and Bel Sar approached the stone archway. Then, Tor Ves didn’t launch into the ornate speech of welcome he had prepared for the Red Reed Pavilion. He had watched enough from the upper stone railing—and heard enough from the clerks who listened by the woodshed—to understand that the young man walking toward him could no longer be purchased with a ribbon or intimidated by a title. During the stone spring crisis during that earlier ordeal, Tor had shown that when pushed to the edge, he cared enough about the people under his roof to shield the hospice patients from the awakened spring guardian. Yet he remained, at bottom, a cautious institutional manager who understood accounts better than apologies.
“You left the red banners hanging over an empty room, Seyun,” Tor Ves said, his voice dry and level as he rested one hand on the cart’s wooden rail.
