“Thank goodness,” Nara Soth said, letting out a low, raspy laugh that shook her single grey-coated shoulder. “If you had stood on this gravel and given me a saintly speech about how a true fighter never thinks about a lost Crown insight, I’d have tapped you across the shin with Ilyra’s ash stick before I left.”
Seyun felt an answering smile tug at his own mouth. “You wanted to check whether I was starting to talk like an old family tablet.”
“For three hundred years,” Nara said, her voice dropping into a quieter, deeply earnest register as the sunset deepened to rose and slate behind the hills, “every single master who ever put a silver needle into my back or built a bronze cage around my chair started by assuring me that he had zero personal appetite for power. Uren’s teacher told me he only cared about preserving Sel Oran’s philosophical heritage. Vaska Ren told me he only cared about the valley villages. Men who pretend they don’t feel the pull of an extraordinary shortcut are the most dangerous people in the world, Seyun. Because they have to invent a noble lie every time they give in to it.”
She tapped the butt of her mountain-ash staff lightly beside his boot. “A young man who loves his craft enough to admit that he still wonders about an unreceived Crown echo before dawn—and who closed the mark five days early anyway because the argument between us was finished—is the only bearer…
