Count Corvane's scream still hung in the smoke of his own burned record-house, the words he had saved for the very end and thrown with everything left in him: that Damian Ravenclaw had died in his sister's place, and that he had died for nothing at all.
The whole hall watched them hit.
Iris stood at the head of the reading table, her hand frozen above the ledgers, and for once the guard failed her. She couldn't keep it off her face, because there are wounds that never close, only wait.
She had carried this one since she was two years old, and every horror that came after, the cage, the basement, the dying scum, had been stacked on top of it until the carrying became the whole architecture of her.
And the man in chains had just reached in with one filthy hand and torn every year of it open at once.
Her face emptied.
The color drained out of it, and her hands, her terrible hands, the ones that had cracked flagstones, began very finely to shake.
'He was a baby.'
