The yellow beam of the horn lantern fell first across Ashaun’s broken boots, climbed the pale, translucent stone of her left forearm braced against the oak doorpost, and stopped at her scarred jaw.
The old man in the patched weaver’s coat did not flinch or step back. His eyes lingered on the grey-white mineral where Ashaun’s left wrist ended without fingers—the unmistakable mark of someone who had stood too close when the war-bells broke at Falling Bells forty-three years ago. Slowly, he shifted the lantern half an inch so its light reached past Ashaun’s shoulder into the dim stable.
Pip stood beside the chalk barrow, all six feet planted quietly in the straw. It had not hidden under the horse-blanket when the footsteps returned. Its branching lattice antlers rose clear in the lantern-gleam, its sideways jaw was closed, and only a faint, steady green warmth showed along the seams of its green-and-white patchwork shell. Behind it stood Ysabet with her hand on the barrow shaft, Kiv with his fingers resting on Siv’s iron collar, Chaska by Lilt’s folded wing, and Osha clutching her satchel.
“Talli said she saw a green hearth-toad with tree-horns behind the lime-casks,” the grandfather said. His voice was dry and unhurried, rough at the bottom from a winter chest-cold. “Then she said it had six legs like the charcoal picture on the grain-hall board. She wanted to know if the bailiff’s men were going to shoot it with big arrows.”
