Behind the overhanging limestone belly of the Gable Crag, the morning sunlight vanished into a narrow, wind-whipped trough of grey shadow. Here, two hundred yards above the watching platform and fully cut off from the sightline of Hall Mistress Soran’s bench, the switchback trail pinched between the upright inner cliff wall on the right and a jagged three-foot drop onto an exposed outer limestone lip on the left.
As Ilyra rounded the blind turn with the sealed bronze-and-mica lamp steady in her left hand, Senior Disciple Vane didn’t meet her with a station salute or a traditional defensive guard. The oiled canvas frost-sheath he had stripped from his weapon lay discarded in the shale behind his heel, and at the end of his seven-foot ash shaft gleamed a leaf-shaped head of live, unblunted marsh-steel fitted with two rear-curving iron barbs.
“You should have stayed on the lowland grain wagons, Ilyra,” Vane said under the roar of the ridge gale, his voice low and rapid where no ear on the platform below could catch it. “Steward Osen says if your Ash Reed pet has hooked a Balance tether into your channels, a little blood on the blind turn will force him to show his hand on the rail—and if he doesn’t, we’ll simply tell the bench your marsh stitches burst on the steep grade.”
