Hest struck warm basin stone before the echo of his bar did.
He rolled onto one shoulder and came up holding the broken half across both palms. Its end showed a bright, twisted wound. The missing hook had gone through the living scar with the white fragment and Jiang's feather.
Beyond the new fold of flesh, the black cord kept moving.
It drew through a narrow armada-facing slit high on the basin wall. Each pull made the sealed scar pucker and sent a white pulse beneath the surface. Warm water recoiled from it as if the basin itself remembered being burned.
Jiang watched from inside four bodies' warmth.
His whole feather was still visible beyond the translucent edge of the scar. Black vane, pale shaft, a drop of his blood at the root. A retrieval fork held it against the broken tooth while Hest's hooked iron scraped beside it.
Jiang wanted the feather back with a hunger that had nothing to do with food. It remained close enough to bite.
Jiang shifted his sound foot beneath him.
