Seyun set the brass animal fat lantern on the corner of the stone stand so its light fell clearly across the quiet focus slab, then knelt on the opposite side of the skeleton to help her. His left shoulder was still wrapped in Mina’s figure-eight linen bandage and Nara possessed only her right arm. Because of that, the two of them worked together like two halves of a single pair of hands.
Nara reached out with the scarred fingers of her right hand and touched the first silver wire anchored to the bronze floor-pin beneath Uren’s chest bone. The exact body location of Place III, where Uren had carried Nara’s own Crown mark during his lifetime, and where Seyun had carried hers until their reconciliation before the seal court.
Over twenty damp winters, the fine silver wire had rusted to a dull pewter grey and grown brittle where it twisted around the dry bone of the xiphoid process. A single impatient yank—or a pulse of cultivated force—would have snapped the wire and shattered the fragile ribs into dust.
Nara didn’t pull, and she didn’t use a whisper of Crown breath.
Bracing her thumb gently against the floor-pin while Seyun steadied the lower curve of the ribs with his right palm, she turned the tiny silver loop counterclockwise half a turn at a time until the tension slacked. Then, with the patience of a weaver unpicking a tangled knot in an old mix, she drew the tarnished strand backward through the…
