Chapter 30. The Confrontation

The stair gave Lora back to the evening like she’d been loaned to the dark for study and returned stamped temporarily adequate. Volamed’s courtyards were drawing breath for night; lanterns found their wicks; the canals learned a different grammar. The city changed voice without changing volume. She matched it—Airenna’s pause fitted between her ribs like a spacer, keeping the moving parts from grinding.

Rell waited where the corridor made a hinge. He had the posture of a boy who had been taught to look invisible and hadn’t yet learned the trick.

“They came again,” he said, low, meaning Elysor’s envoys. “Wider shoulders this time. Fewer words.”

“Fewer words can be worse,” she said.

He glanced down at her forearm where the second crescent slept in its new clarity. “The Council is convened. They’ll listen. They always do first.”

“And then?”

“Then they remember who they are,” he said, with a Volamed-born fatalism that sounded like a weather repo