The inner hall had been built for giants, or for beasts that needed the height of four barns to turn around in the air.
Stone pillars thick as lime kilns held up a vaulted roof lost in peat smoke. Between the pillars, rope hurdles divided the flagstones into sleeping pens where thirty or forty travelers huddled over tallow dips, drying boots and boiling turnip soup. And above the hurdles, clinging to low granite crossbeams that spanned the hall ten feet off the floor, hung the moths.
There were twelve of them. The smallest had a furry, barrel-shaped thorax the size of a wine cask and wings that drooped on either side like folded tapestries of russet, ash-grey, and soot-black wool. Travel-worn families sat directly beneath the hanging wing-tips, holding chilblained hands toward the steady, dry heat that radiated from the insects’ dense body fur.
“Winter sleepers,” a kettle-mender near the door told Chaska proudly, waving a spoon toward the massive brown abdomen above his bedroll. “Been hanging there since the first frost in harvest month. Better than a brick stove, and they never ask for firewood.”
Chaska helped Lilt settle onto a patch of dry rushes against the west wall, unbuckling her light folding glider frame so the sandray could tuck her leading fins beneath her chin. “I thought mountain silk-backs migrated south to the salt-flower basins before the passes closed.”
