Keystone

One frost. One night. Two guardians who have waited five hundred years.For a year, master carver Tobias Wren has knelt on the old Kingsbridge with chisel and rasp, bringing two crumbling stone guardians back from ruin. He talks to them while he works. He tells them about his day, his family, the council clerk he would love to drop in the river. He runs his thumb along every seam he mends, far more often than the work requires, and tells himself it is only pride in a good joint.The city wants them broken up for rubble. Tobias has just set down his rasp for the last time.Then the first hard frost comes down, the moon rises over the spires of Vellmarch, and the stone under his palm turns warm.Brannoc is massive, dark as weathered granite, horned and winged and slow to speak. Ashlar is pale as limestone, quick and wicked and rarely at a loss for words. They are bonded, and have been for five centuries. And they have felt every single touch of Tobias's hands for a year.Now they have until first light, and they would like to spend every hour of it on him. They will ask first. They will want to hear him say yes out loud. And then they are going to show the man who made them whole exactly how much they noticed.But the frost does not last, the sun always rises, and somewhere in an old charter in Tobias's workshop is a line he has been too afraid to test.A single night was all the old law ever promised. Tobias has a chisel, a steady hand, and a few hours of dark left to argue with it.