Location:The Pavilion — The Workshop · Six Valleys of the Lower Realm
Date/Time:24 Flamefade 9943 AZI, Restday, dusk; then the second bell after midnight
Realm:Lower Realm
At dusk, before anybody flew, Isha had marked their palms.
He did it in the workshop, at the end of the bench, with the six of them standing in a line in front of him as children stand for a doctor, and nobody laughed, not even Xinglong. One at a time, he took each right hand in his own furred ones and turned it palm up, and put the tip of one finger in the middle of it, and said a word in the tongue nobody alive still used, and where his finger had been there was nothing to see at all. Jayde felt it go in like the warmth of a cup held too long. It did not fade. It sat in the palm as a coin sits in a pocket, a small certain weight that was not there when she looked, and was there every time she stopped looking.
