Kezra kept her fingertip pressed firmly against the cross-hatched red scar on the drafting linen, right at the point where the narrow check ledge snapped off above the drainage drift. Her pulse was steady. But her voice carried the sharp, unsparing care of a weighted drop-line dropped from a high transit.
“Davren,” she said, looking straight across the table into his shadowed eyes. “Answer me this honestly. If that shale ledge had held—if the rock hadn’t snapped off beneath your boot. You had found a narrow, single-file footpath climbing over the hard speckled granite shoulder to open sky—would you have walked down that path and come home to Kilnstep?”
For five long seconds, the sorting shed was fully, breathtakingly quiet. The mountain wind gusted across the corrugated slate roof edges, rattling the dried seed pods hanging from the timber rafters. But around the frame stand table no one breathed. Fellis Dain kept his measuring tongs frozen in his good right hand. Paxa Sel watched Davren’s throat with cold and exact intensity. And Yseld Arken sat like a statue carved of dark river stone.
Davren’s mouth opened. The automatic, reflexive answer of a younger brother—the easy, reassuring ‘Of course I would have’—rose to his lips, conditioned by a lifetime of performing filial devotion for his mother and sister.
