The two words sat at the bottom of the forge wall, small and slightly crooked beside the larger sketches, and for a while nobody in the workshop said anything about them.
Kael had copied each stroke from the letters Cael had drawn in the dust a moment earlier, pressing the charcoal down slowly, the way a hunter might trace a track he was afraid of smudging.
At a glance, it didn't seem like a masterpiece, but every line sat exactly where it belonged.
Dorian was the first to speak. He stood with his arms folded over his leather apron and studied the wall as though it had said something rude about his forge.
"I would have taken your word for it, you know," he said. "It looks like a crow walked through the ashes."
"It says remember exactly," Kael said. "Cael showed me how his people write it down."
"And that is your answer to the crossbow?"
