"What's alive in there?" Wren asks. She surprises herself — the words come out steady, which is more than she can say for most of the morning. The brook woman's expression shifts — not quite a smile, but the ghost of one, the kind kept in reserve for the right question. She tilts the box, very slightly, and a thread of amber light leaks from the joint between lid and body. It pulses, slow and even, like a sleeping thing breathing. "The knight called it a guide," the woman says. "I call it a debt — his last errand, not yet run." She glances from the box to the faded sun-sigil on Wren's breastplate. "The Ember of Aldermere won't show itself to anyone who goes looking cold. It only comes to what it knows." A pause. Stream-sounds fill it. "He taught it his sigil. Not you."