Half an hour after sunrise, Ashaun, Chaska, and Sister Osha climbed the slate chimney to meet Ysabet and carry her blanket roll and grease lamp down to the camp.
Before descending, Osha walked ten paces across the shelf toward the broken jaw-trap to make sure no oiled wrapping cloth had blown into the rocks. She stopped beside the flat slab where Ysabet had set down the salted mutton two days earlier.
“Ysabet,” Osha called softly, pointing at the stone. “Look here.”
The mutton ribs were gone, carried up the mountain with the manticore cubs. In the exact center of the flat granite slab, ringed by three broad claw marks and the sideways scrape of the fourth toe in the hoarfrost, lay a palm-sized piece of smoky gray-clear stone.
Ysabet walked over slowly, bracing her ash staff with her left hand, and crouched beside Osha.
It was one of the remaining crystal throat plates from near Oru’s collarbone. The old fracture from Red Ford had loosened its root in the scar tissue over the years, and the jerk of the syndicate’s steel wire the day before had nearly worked it free; sometime before dawn, Oru had rubbed his neck against the rock to shed the loose plate and nudged it onto the slab where she had left the meat.
