At dawn Mara walked out into the Low Brace street, and the light was different.
She had not slept. Nobody on the crew had. They had sat in the Quiet Forge through the rest of the night, watching Eshel’s three gauges and Anwen’s palm and the high window, while the new heart held. Lisan had come up at midnight for the custody record and the Board’s clerk with the queue. Cant had spoken once, from the shrine, through the chamber’s speaker: the packet has arrived at the internal bridge; the keeper is disconnected; the bridge is not the bridge on the route’s map; the packet has nothing to close. And then nothing more. The packet had gone silent.
At the first grey Sera had flown Mara down to the Low Brace in the Tern. Mara had asked to walk the last of it.
So she walked.
The Low Brace at dawn. The lanes between the tenements, the frost on the cobbles, the river road beyond. She had walked it every morning of her life. And it was different.
The light.
Hearth was rising over the cooling towers, as it always did. But the light coming off it was not the white she remembered from before the cut. Nor the deep red of the last five days. It was warmer than the white. Softer. A full golden light that lay over the frozen roofs and the street and made the frost glitter without making it glare. And around Hearth’s edge, where…
