Kei peeked from the fissure .
The bleed bark held him in its widened wound , the slow red sap weeping past the lip of the opening , and through the narrow gap he watched the forest floor where he had made his feast . He kept his body still inside the dark of the fissure , the twin blades held low and unmoving , the poker face composed into the specific emptiness it produced when watching was the only correct action and any motion at all was the wrong one .
Along the seam of the joined trunks , two other fissures had risked the same peering . The High Cleric watched from his concealment with the controlled stillness of a Master practitioner gathering intelligence — the eyes moving , the body not . Corvyn beside him , the Scholar Rite Cleric's careful attention crossing the scene and filing it , cataloguing the thing in front of them with the discipline of a man who had learned that the things most worth recording were usually the things most capable of killing the recorder .
