The weight of the brass metal tube in Kezra Venn’s palm was not merely the dead gravity of metal. It was the choking, packed mass of eleven lost months.
She stood in the dim lantern light of Joric Thane’s command wagon, her thumb resting on the cold, lead-tin solder collar that bound the threaded cap.
Beside her, Yseld Arken remained motionless by the draft curtain, her hooked staff grounded in the floorboards. Across the scarred larch table, Joric pushed a small iron scoring file and a pair of brass wire-snips across the wood toward her hands.
Kezra didn’t pick up the snips.
Instead, a sudden, hot wave of anger—sharp, bitter, and fully unexpected—rose from her stomach into her throat, choking out the relief of a moment before. Her fingers clenched around the brass tube until the copper binding wire bit into her calloused knuckles.
She looked up at Joric Thane, her dark eyes flashing in the lamplight.
“Eleven months,” Kezra said. Her voice was not loud. But it trembled with an intensity that made the flame in the gimbal-lamp flicker. “Eleven months, Master Thane. You have held this tube in your iron strongbox since before the first winter frost. My mother has spent three seasons setting an extra clay bowl on the table every evening. She sat by the kiln through four blizzards wondering whether her son’s bones were being picked clean by mountain crows in some Blackglass crevice.”
