The Brook Woman's hands go still on the wood. The question hangs in the mist a moment longer than questions usually do. "You mean to say you don't know where he is," she says. Not quite an accusation. Not quite grief, either. Wren thinks of the hayloft. The way no one quite met her eyes when she asked why the original bearer hadn't come himself. The way they pressed the parchment into her hands without much explanation at all. "He died," she says. "Three days before I left. The fever." The Brook Woman absorbs this the way old stone absorbs rain — slowly, without drama, with tremendous finality. She looks at the box for a long moment. "Then the oath is still waiting," she says at last. "A sun-clasp vow doesn't die with its keeper. It waits in the sigil." Her thumb traces the latch. "Speak his name, and you speak it somewhere he can still hear. That is what the old words are for."