Location:Imperial City — Seer Tower, Streets of the Second Ring
Date/Time:TC1854.03.01 (Evening)
The wooden horse fit in Kael's palm.
He'd bought it at a stall in the Fourth District market — a place he shouldn't have been, an Imperial Heir browsing craftsmen's booths in a ring where the formation lights still flickered because the converters hadn't been installed yet. The vendor had looked at his clothes, at the quality of his boots, at the jade ring on his finger that bore the Xuán dynasty seal, and had tried to charge him thirty gold phoenixes for a toy worth three.
Kael had paid it without negotiating. Not because money was irrelevant — because the vendor was a father too. The man's daughter had been sitting behind the stall, playing with an identical horse, and the recognition between them had been immediate. Two men who loved their children and didn't know how to show it through anything more articulate than carved wood.
