While the green clay dried into a firm crust across Pip’s back, Ysabet and her companions kept their half of the causeway bargain.
Sitting around the peat brazier inside the rush shelter, with Osha’s two surviving memory stones and her father’s damp leather notebook laid out on a dry wool cloth to air, they told Iskren the whole plain history: the auction behind the bathhouse in Bent Reed, Edris Keth’s iron ring and the forty-three-year-old reliquary from Falling Bells, the forced projection at the White Fen observatory, and the pinned silk-backs they had cut loose from Corven’s rafters that afternoon.
Iskren listened without interrupting once, slowly paring a dry willow peg with his belt knife while the steam from the lower spring hissed softly beneath the floorboards.
“Corven’s road-bailiffs won’t cross the high bog in the dark,” Iskren said when Ashaun finished describing the broken postern gate. “And their heavy horses can’t walk the submerged stone ribs without breaking their fetlocks in the mimic pools. Edris will have to take his wagons around by the east mule-cut above the timberline. That gives us two or three clear days before his outriders find the dry sheep-track into this basin.”
Osha looked up from turning a curled leaf of her father’s notebook. “You didn’t seem surprised when I read what my father wrote about how devotion narrows a young seed. Have you been to the Wild Cradle?”
