When Iskren went off to check the night lines, Osha and Chaska stayed at the trestle table with two tallow candles and the brass wind-lamp lit between them.
Osha had opened Mother Suth’s unfinished field journal to the blank linen pages behind the old woman’s pressed moss notes. Dipping her quill carefully into the inkhorn, she copied Iskren’s compass bearings, water-hole notes, and the three beetle-bridge crossings in a neat, cramped scholar’s hand. Beside her, Chaska had spread out Suth’s migration-responsive map—whose faint mineral lines shifted slowly with the season’s cold—and was marking sheltered cliff ledges, wind-lee pockets big enough for Lilt’s wingspan, and rope anchor points with a stick of red chalk.
Down by the warm stone hearth at the end of the tarp, Ysabet was scraping the last dried crust of yesterday’s poultice off Pip’s right flank with a wooden butter knife.
Three days of hot-spring clay, clean slate, and rest had done their work. The soft, spongy spots left by the moth flight had firmed up again, and the broad four-inch strip where the mimic pool had eaten away Pip’s armor was no longer raw or oozing sap. A new mineral layer had hardened across the gap, fused tightly to the older shell at both ends along the Little Harbor seam.
