While Hall Mistress Soran’s white-ash spear wove a shimmering silver screen across the southern mouth of the row of stone pillars—catching one crushing Jade squeezing wave after another and bleeding their force into the outer granite pillars at the cost of a thin red line of blood re-opening beneath her temple bandage—Ilyra and laundry attendant Jesh burst through the northern back kitchen door into the ground-floor hallway of the Eastern Dormitories.
The inside hall was dark. It shook with the thunder of granite pillars splitting outside. Then it filled with the scared weeping of valley children from Red Creek and Birch Hollow who had already seen their village roofs collapse five days ago in the flood-chute.
“Nobody goes out the front doors into the row of stone pillars!” Ilyra’s voice rang out down the plaster-dusted hallway, clear and unshaken as she grounded her marsh-iron spear to steady a group of twelve-year-old foundation new students who were crowding toward the shuttered windows. “Form two lines by height! Older new students carry the valley toddlers—follow Jesh up the drying-loft ladders into the upper roof-truss walk!”
At the head of the narrow cedar stairs, twenty-one-year-old Jesh had already thrown open the heavy trapdoor leading into the heated linen-drying gallery that ran above the third-floor ceiling floor beams all the way to the high archive terrace. Her face was set like carved river-stone. Twenty minutes ago in the hallway outside the clerk hall, Ilyra had told her in three plain sentences what Osen Tal…
