Wren's gaze keeps snagging on the box. It rests on dry stone as though the brook simply agrees to part around it — the sun-clasp at its latch catching the thin canopy-light like a wink. The brook_woman's jar is nearly full, but her attention, whatever else she pretends, is entirely on that small wooden square. "What's in the box?" Wren asks. Her voice has a crack in it — honest curiosity, not quite knightly. The woman finally looks up. Her eyes are creek-bottom pale. "A question," she says, "that the last armored traveller had the good sense not to ask." She sets the brimming jar carefully beside the box, the two objects arranged with something close to ceremony. Then she studies the faded sun-sigil on the borrowed breastplate — and her expression shifts just barely, the way a flame shifts when a door opens somewhere else. "Your crest," she says. "Tell me how you came by it."