Four weeks after the garrison litters carried Edris and Veyt up the northern switchbacks, the first thin green spears of marsh-grain poked through the grey silt around the middle seepage pool.
Ashaun found them at sunrise while she was carrying a bucket of ash down from the cookfire. There were nineteen shoots in all, no thicker than sewing needles, leaning slightly toward the warm steam rising off the fault water. She squatted on her heels for ten minutes without touching them, resting her stone left forearm across her knee while the sun cleared the eastern ridge.
Up under the dry stone overhang where the expedition had left its heavy supply tables, Osha was already at work with two inkpots, her father Amren’s water-stained Cradle journal, and a stack of wide linen folios she had traded three spare blankets to the garrison quartermaster to obtain.
Yesterday a mounted clerk from the southern chapter house had ridden up the mule track carrying a sealed parchment from the senior synod. The synod had read Edris’s signed admission and wished to contain the scandal: they offered to restore Osha’s full scholar’s stipend, clear her name of insubordination, and pay for the printing of her valley survey, provided the preface described the surviving creature either as the blessed vessel of Azhrak’s purified peace or as a cleansed beast scrubbed of all ancient taint by temple rites.
