The air in the drainage channel had never felt so heavy.
Noll Vey watched through the limestone lintel as the silence lengthened. Every stage instinct from his thirty years on the road urged him to intercede. An actor knew how to protect an audience from grief; when a play turned dark, you brought on the fiddler, you offered a quick rhyme, you told the crowd that the dead queen had merely stepped behind the curtain to change her velvet gown. A sweet falsehood was the easiest gift in the world to give to a weeping child.
Prit sat in the silt, holding little Pim against the damp wool of his coat. Around him, the other seven children waited, their eyes wide and frightened, their small bodies taut with the dread of having done something wrong.
Sen’s fingers dug into the fabric of Tov’s sleeve. “Mister Prit?” she asked, her voice cracking on the syllables. “Where is she? Why didn’t she bring the lantern herself?”
The bone imp bowed his ivory skull until his brow touched the little girl’s dark hair. For forty winters, Prit had been an instrument of state measurement, recording claims, logging liabilities, and cataloging the ruin of six successive masters. He knew the cost of every word spoken in the presence of a living blue stone.
