At first grey light, before the mist lifted off the stream, Siv found the way in.
The old wolf’s left jaw was still puffy below the eye, though Kiv’s willow-bark poultice had taken the worst heat out of the gum overnight. Walking unburdened ahead of Tern and Moth, Siv worked the northern edge of the great rockfall where Pip had heard the dry clicking the evening before. Twice the wolf sneezed hard to clear powdered chalk from his nostrils. Then his scarred ears pricked forward. He pushed his grey muzzle beneath a curtain of two-leaf briars—one side thorn-toothed like blackberry, the other smooth as willow—and blew out a long, low breath against a split seam in the cliff base.
Ysabet crouched beside Kiv and smelled it too: not the sour tallow and iron grease of Edris’s trench, but a faint, unmistakable thread of crushed woodland moss and dry cedar. It was the scent of Mother Suth’s old cloak, carried on the wooden joints of her walking-stick guide.
Chaska parted the briars with her walking pole and peered in with one small navigation mirror angled to catch the grey sky.
“Two levels,” she whispered, gesturing them closer. “Up top, there’s a narrow limestone crack about shoulder-wide and knee-high where the cliff split away from the talus. Down below, where the old creek bed undercut the slab, there’s a wider washed-out culvert running parallel under the same shelf. The lower one has four feet of headroom and a gravel floor, but there’s…
