Page 168 of Zenith Tower

“Not yet,” Lior said. “There are stewards near the village. But eventually.”

She absorbed that without looking away from the box.

“I want to see it again,” she said. “I want to remember which room was mine and whether the pear tree is still behind the kitchen. But my statement is three pages. I was inside that place for two years.”

Delphine looked around the table. “I can identify rooms Astra never saw. I know which stewards moved residents after dark. I remember names that never reached the hearing. If these pages are leaving the mountain, I want those names with them.”

Lior’s jaw tightened. “And after you give it?”

“Then I decide again.”

He stared at the letters between them. At last he untied the blue thread and placed the first one in her hand.

“Then I’ll help you remember what you can.”

Delphine bent over the page. Lior moved his chair beside hers, close enough that their shoulders touched.

Cosima drew a fresh sheet toward her. Rev broke the seal on the ink. Outside, the farmer’s daughter led two saddled horses behind the barn, hidden from the road by the orchard wall.

Sunlight moved across the kitchen floor while the inkdried. Kieran rested near the fire. Caspian argued quietly with Hale about which route the first packet should take. Delphine began to dictate the names of people the Tower had taught itself not to remember.

I sat beside her and wrote them down.

Astra

Lior had been gone less than four hours when another horse came up the farm track.

He had spent three days at the farmhouse helping Delphine read her old letters and recover the names buried among them. At noon he left with the wooden letter box wrapped inside his saddlebag and one copy of the Tower record sewn beneath the lining. Delphine had stood at the gate until the trees took him from sight. At dusk she was back in the yard when the new rider appeared, a dark shape driving his horse hard between the bare hedges.

Hale saw him first.

One moment he was splitting kindling beside the barn. The next, the axe was down and his hand had gone to the knife at his belt.

“Inside,” he called.

Caspian rose too quickly from the porch and caught his injured side. Kieran came out behind him with his sling beneath his coat. Rev crossed the yard toward the concealed path to the horses while Cosima went to the gate.

The rider lifted one empty hand before she reached him.

“Courier,” he said. “Juno’s route.”

His horse was lathered beneath the tack, foam darkening its chest. He landed unsteadily and nearly went to one knee. A folded page came from inside his coat, its black wax seal softened by the heat of his body.

“This was issued after first bell,” he said. “Copies are going to every Hall township between the mountain and the capital. The official criers are half a day behind me.”

Cosima took the page but did not break the seal.

“Were you followed?”

“Not after the north fork. I changed horses twice.”

Rev had reached the tree line. She waited there, watching the road behind him.

Cosima turned the page over. The Council stamp covered the fold, pressed above the smaller mark of the emergency registry.

“House,” she said.

We gathered around the kitchen table while the farmer’s wife barred the shutters. Evening narrowed to thin gold lines at their edges. The rider stayed near the door with both hands around a cup he had not yet drunk from.