At the top of the lower switchback, the limestone road divided between a broad, colonnaded gallery leading toward the clerk hall residence and a wind-scoured apron of grey flat stone slab where White Heron’s base students ordinarily drilled in hundred-man spear squares. Seyun expected Ilyra to take the right-hand row of stone pillars directly to Osen Tal’s registry desk before the midday drum. Instead, she turned left through the open stone arch of the western outer courts. She gestured with her chin for him to follow.
No spear formations were drilling on the flags. Across the entire width of the three-hundred-foot court, three dozen tarred canvas shelters had been lashed directly to the iron weapon racks and boundary bollards with hemp cart-rope. Flat limestone slabs lifted from the practice paths weighted the tent skirts against the gusts, and narrow trenches had been chipped through the packed snow to carry meltwater away from bundled straw pallets. Nearly two hundred lowland townspeople—goat-herders, charcoal burners, and terraced-barley farmers from the high northern creeks—crowded beneath the canvas awnings. Their coarse wool coats smelled of wet sheepskin, animal fat, and pine-soot.
Near the center of the court, four cast-iron cooking pots hung over brick field-hearths. It sent clouds of barley-and-turnip steam whipping horizontally toward the cliff edge. The cooking pots bore the cut cleanly heron crest of the inner students’ refectory. The young people working the long wooden ladles were not hired kitchen scullions. Six inner-court spear students in soot-streaked white robes moved down the…
