On the twenty-fourth morning after Len Vey crossed the boundary canopy, five thousand people gathered in the open cobblestone plaza before the central tram sheds.
The sun had risen above the high granite ridge of the Guard three hours earlier, bathing the gray basin in a pale, crystal-clear white light that warmed the frost from the iron rails and set the meltwater dripping steadily from the shed roof edges. The air was thin, cold, and clean. Carrying the crisp, pine-scented scent of alpine pine needles and thawing mountain peat, entirely free of the acrid copper stench that had choked the valley for twelve years.
In the center of the vast square, where Doma Reel had organized the morning soup lines, inspected lamp wicks, and weighed flour rations to the half-ounce for four thousand days, a simple timber bier had been erected.
It wasn’t a vaulted catafalque of polished black marble. It bore no gold-trimmed heraldic beasts or town crests. It was a sturdy, four-foot-high platform built from ten rough, creosote-stained pine railway sleepers, mortised together with wooden treenails by the track repair crews who had eaten her boiled turnips every winter of their lives.
Doma Reel lay upon the timber platform, resting upon a mattress of fresh, clean barley straw, wrapped in a shroud of heavy, raw, unwhitened linen woven on the hand-looms of the River Ward.
