Edren Dene sat hunched over his knees on the low pine bench, his fingers clawing at the coarse grey wool of his trousers as though the fabric were the only solid thing left in the valley.
Beneath his unbuttoned flannel shirt, the surgical scar over his ribs—where Fen had drawn out the red-sealed ore shard months ago—glowed with a dull, feverish crimson. Every three seconds, the harmonic vibration from the Survey House cellar pulsed through the floorboards, a dry, tooth-aching thrum that made the tallow candle on the washstand flicker without a draft.
Noll Vey remained kneeling on the cold flagstones, his six-hundred-pound limestone host body creaking as the iron pins in his knees settled. He kept his chipped stone hands resting palm-upward on his thighs, offering no spells, no grand theater declarations, and no blue core light.
“Edren,” Noll repeated, keeping his voice down to the low, dry rasp of grinding lime. “What do you need?”
The older miner swallowed hard. A spasm of pain crossed his weathered face, deepening the white furrows around his mouth, but when he lifted his chin, his dark eyes fixed on Noll’s carved nose with desperate focus.
“Three things, Noll,” Edren whispered, his voice trembling like a slack hoist-rope. “Just three. First... my tin box under the straw mattress in the north alcove. The square tea-tin with the soldered brass latch. It has every weekly pay chit the Crown paymasters stamped for me between the year eighty-four and the autumn the roof came…
