The East Treasure-Lens Room smelled of boiled willow bark, rubbed beeswax, and clean lime.
When Noll had first claimed the room’s narrow casement pane in his second week as a core—telling three nervous delvers that the leaded glass showed a viewer whatever treasure they valued most—it had been a cheap fairground peep-show meant to squeeze a few witness points out of greedy prospectors. Since then, backed by Sella Rusk’s surveyor charts and Fen’s careful clinic notes, the window (D-06) had settled into something far more practical: a clear, mineral-true lens that caught the glint of buried iron, silver seam, and core stone through timber, dirt, or living bone.
“Unbutton the flannel all the way to the belt, Master Dene,” Fen said gently, warming a hollow flared horn of turned alder wood between his palms before he touched it to the miner’s cold skin. “And don’t try to hold your breath still for me. Breathe the way you do when you’re sitting on your porch.”
At twenty, Fen still had the ink-calloused middle finger of a temple copyist and a patch of grey hill-mud dried on the hem of his wool smock, yet the boy changed whenever a sick person sat on his table. The hesitant, earnest stoop left his shoulders. His hands moved with a quiet, unhurried certainty that reminded Noll of the one honest watchmaker he had ever known in the southern towns.
