The warm vessel was not an empty mould. Sella saw that as soon as Ysra lifted the lamp, and the sight of it went through her like a draught through a shut room. There was a face in the clay.
It was cast in relief on the belly of the vessel, just below the shoulder, where the curve of the clay was smoothest. It was the size of a child’s palm and it was the colour of old ivory, pale and fine-grained and slightly glossed, as though someone had waxed it. It was a woman’s face. It was plain and tired, with the lines of a person who had spent long hours bent over a desk, and it looked out of the clay with a steady, unsurprised expression, the way a clerk looks up from a column he has been adding all night and does not expect to finish. The eyes were half closed. The mouth was closed. The forehead had two faint creases above the brows, the marks of concentration and of a headache that had not gone away.
Sella had seen that face before. She had seen it every day for two years, in the Chamber, across the long table, in the candlelight at the Turn. It was the face the Mantle wore. It was the plain clerk’s face the body had shown the Hold since the first winter, when it had first sat up in the Keystone’s shadow and asked to be counted. Idrin had come to…
