Kel Dorr was still sitting on the damp cobblestones of Fish Street long after the crowd had scattered to inspect the tenement walls. His gold-trimmed summoning wand lay in the gutter mud three feet away, its golden finish scratched and smeared with horse manure. His fine velvet apprentice slippers were soaked through with filthy river water, but he didn’t move. He sat shivering, his head buried in his hands. He stared at the scattered chalk dust of his useless circle.
He felt small, hollow, and utterly humiliated. For three years, the professors of the High Terraces had told him that summoners were the divine stewards of the empire, that ordinary laborers were cattle who needed to be ruled with golden wands. That elemental spirits were mindless engines that felt no pain. But he had seen the carrier’s eyes. He had felt the terrible, painful recoil of a living presence being ground into powder by an unexecutable legal clause.
A shadow fell over him. He flinched, expecting mockery or a kick from an angry docker. Instead, a clean linen rag was offered to his sight, held in a hand that was stained with dark oak-ink and scraped with lime mortar. He looked up. Pella Rook was standing over him, her face calm, serious, and entirely devoid of vindictive triumph.
