Noll kept his stone heels planted on the flagstones of the Grand Hall, three paces back from the kitchen arch, and did the hardest thing he had ever asked of his second life: he kept his mouth shut.
In fifty-one mortal years on the road, silence had always felt like an unpaid bill coming due. Whenever a mark frowned at a card table or a town bailiff squinted at a permit, Noll Vey’s salvation had depended on filling the air with words before suspicion hardened into a fist. Even now, with a carved basalt breastbone and a blue core facet ticking inside his ribs, his instinct was to march his heavy boots through the doorway, lay a theatrical hand on Fen’s shoulder, and spin some assurance about how everything would turn out neatly when the curtains rose.
He did not move. Down the hall, Hobb scraped dried dough from his bread paddles with the back of a knife, giving the kitchen door a respectful berth. Noll let his awareness rest gently inside the warm lime mortar of the partition wall—listening without pressing, as an old house holds the sound of two people talking after midnight.
Inside the kitchen, the kettle hissed softly. Steam rose from the mug of steeped mint Hobb had left beside the washbasin, smelling of crushed leaves across wet camp mud and drying blood on Fen’s cuffs.
