Wren straightens — as much as the pauldron allows — and says, simply, "He's dead." She tells it plainly. The knight's name was Aldric. He took a fever three days before the moon began to swell, and she found him in the miller's spare room, parchment still in his fist. Nobody in the village knew the wood; nobody else owned a sword. She is seventeen. The armour doesn't fit. The sword has never been raised against anything that mattered. She understood perhaps half the parchment, if she is being generous with herself. She stops. "That's all I am," she says. "Everything that's left." The brook_woman is quiet. Then she picks up the clay jar — not to leave, Wren thinks, but to give her hands something to do with themselves. "Well," she says, and something in her voice has shifted — not softer exactly, but less measured. "That's the first true thing I've heard in a very long time."