They buried Rowe on the second morning.
The settlement had spent the day before counting.
Wounded.
Missing.
Damaged households.
People who had not yet returned from the outer paths.
By nightfall, the final count had settled.
Rowe was the only name the attack had taken for good.
Vane watched relief move through Ossara when that became certain and understood immediately why none of it made the next morning easier.
One death was still one whole person.
Torvin prepared the burial himself.
He did everything slowly.
Rowe's cord had been taken from the archive shelf before dawn and laid across a low stone table near the edge of the settlement. Vane had seen dozens of those cords by now, enough to understand how much of a life could be reduced into knots without ever quite becoming the life itself.
Rowe's was shorter than Kest's.
Shorter than Calder's.
There should have been more room left on it.
Torvin began counting.
Each knot was named aloud.
A proving.
A season.
