The rain did not stop when Sella went to sleep, but it found a quieter rhythm against the broken parapets, settling into a cold mountain soak that smelled of soot, wet alder leaves, and drowned sheep-droppings.
In the darkened Grand Hall, Noll Vey kept watch from the wet lime seams behind his blue stone. Without a body, a core did not sleep; it simply listened to the load-bearing masonry settle against the hill. He followed a thin draft of night air as it crept through a hair-crack beneath the western sill, slid across the dry flagstones of his Hearth ring, and curled around the legs of the stove where Hobb and Fen sat on low wooden stools.
The stove grate burned with that low, fuel-less amber pulse Noll had brought into the world on his second night—honest heat that asked for no split oak, so long as those who warmed their palms kept civil peace under the rafters. Hobb had set a small tin saucepan on the iron plate to simmer a pot of weak winter tea made from dried mint and roasted barley hulls. Fen sat hunched over the rim of a scarred deal trestle, picking charred lint from a bundle of salvaged linen bandages with a pair of brass tweezers.
