He told Casvar in the morning.
He said it simply, with the careful grammar of someone who had one hundred and fourteen words and needed all of them to be correct: that the pull reached the dead, that the dead could feel it, that the dead were not blank.
He said it without preamble because Casvar did not prefer preamble and because Kael had learned that delivering difficult information directly was the only way to deliver it in this place. The long approaches were not respected here. What was respected was accuracy.
Casvar listened without moving. The Fractures on his skin did their slow, continuous river-motion, but the rest of him was entirely still in the way that Kael now recognized as its own signal — not the stillness of inattention but the stillness of a person absorbing something that is rearranging other things it has touched on the way in.
When Kael finished, Casvar said nothing for a long time.
Then he said: "You are certain."
Not a question. A request for confirmation.
Kael said: "I am certain of what I felt. I am not certain what it means."
Casvar looked at the window. At the permanent absence beyond it that was not sky. When he looked back, something in his expression had shifted — the specific shift Kael had learned to read as the closing of a door Casvar had been holding open for a while.
He said: "Sit."
Kael sat on the floor. Casvar remained standing, which was unusual — the old man generally preferred to place himself at the same level as whoever he was addressing, as if height were a variable he liked to eliminate. Today he stayed standing, and his Fractures moved a little faster, and he spoke in a measured way, choosing his words with the deliberateness of someone selecting tools for a specific work.
He said: "The question of what the dead retain has been asked before. In Valdrek's history, there have been those who claimed to sense it — a residue. A warmth where there should be cold. Most were dismissed. The instruments showed nothing that could be measured."
Kael said: "The instruments measure Fractures. Not what passes through them."
Casvar's mouth did the thing it did — the faint involuntary motion at the corner, brief and quickly suppressed.
He said: "No. They do not."
He said nothing else for a moment, and in that moment Kael understood, with the clarity of a translation that had just resolved itself: Casvar had known. Not precisely — not the detail of the raised hand, the trace of teal in the Fractures, the warmth at the far end of the pull. But the shape of it. He had known the shape and had been waiting to see whether Kael would find it himself, or whether Kael would use the dead without finding it, the way the Kaer four hundred years ago had used them without finding it, and burn another wing.
Kael said: "You wanted to know if I would notice."
Casvar said: "I wanted to know if you were the kind of person who noticed."
He let that sit.
Then he said: "What you do with the knowledge is the second question. What you are, for having asked it — that was the first."
He moved toward the wooden case on the bench. He opened it. He held out the teal-threaded instrument — the one whose thread was the color of deep winter water, the one he had never aimed at Kael directly.
He said: "It is time for the third instrument."
Kael looked at it. He did not know, yet, what the teal thread measured. But the shape of what it might be was already assembling itself in the back of his thinking, and he sat with it quietly and breathed the way Casvar had taught him, and waited.