Halfway down the southern switchback, the iron-banded slate of Remembrance gave way to pale grey granite, and the air stopped humming.
Ysabet felt the change in her teeth before she saw the water. All morning on the upper terraces, the mountain had felt crowded—first with the warm, restless updrafts of the Skin Garden, and then with the old footstep-echoes pressed into the dark slate. On the Return path, the granite underfoot was dense, cold, and five hundred feet thick. Even the scrubby birch bushes along the path stopped dividing into three kinds of leaf and held single, ordinary oval blades against the wind.
At the bottom of the switchback lay a sheltered gravel hollow where a clear spring welled up from a cleft in the grey granite.
The pool was about twenty feet across, bordered by white ledges of stone-crusted moss that looked like rimed snow. No steam rose from it, and no bubbles broke its surface; the water simply slid over a low granite lip into a mossy runnel with a quiet, steady trickle.
Twenty paces above the high-water mark, where a dry bank of coarse gravel met the base of an overhanging boulder, a long, low mound of river stones had been piled over a trench eight feet long. That was where Amren had buried the six-horned sacred beast in the dark before midwinter.
