The whistling wind through the high wall vents did not carry snow, yet the temperature in the Grand Hall plummeted until droplets on Fen’s linen froze into grey crusts of ice.
Near the inner archway leading to the scullery, Sergeant Berr did not step back or draw his broadsword. He stood with his hooded skull inclined forward, dark eye sockets fixed on Renn’s trembling hands. But where the amber light of the fuel-less hearth should have cast a dense shadow behind his left arm, the flags remained bare.
Noll felt the disturbance in his blue core like a sudden drop in well water. The mortar seams along the eastern wall pulled tight, vibrating with dry tension that made lime-wash flake from the ceiling stones.
“Look at his wrist,” Tessa whispered, knuckles pale against her lips. “Fen, look at his fingers.”
The sergeant’s left hand—the hand that had clawed up through the flagstones clutching the water-stained pay list of sixty guards and three hundred civilians—was losing its solidity. The ivory grain of the metacarpals grew translucent, turning into a pale haze drifting like woodsmoke in a downdraft. When Berr tried to curl his fingers toward his palm, the movement left no wake in the air. The bone dissolved into cold light, reappearing only in faint pulses that matched Renn’s ragged breathing.
