As the late afternoon sun dropped behind the western ridge of the Hollow Summit. He plunged the dark rock staging yard into blue mountain shadow an hour before true dusk, Daro Kesh and Ilyra walked slowly along the northern retaining wall under the pretense of stretching their legs after the climb. From his narrow viewing slot between the front bench and the bitter-reed sacks, Seyun watched where the two Bronze fighters stopped. Beside a long, roofed stone shed where empty return-crates and three unhitched cargo sledges from earlier deliveries stood stacked in neat rows waiting to be hauled back down the valley after the lamp window closed.
Even from twenty paces away across the gravel, Seyun didn’t need Archivist Vel’s glasses to read the burned branding-irons stamped into the pine boards of those crates. He had spent three years scrubbing the exact same emblem off the apothecary barrels at Ash Reed. He had seen the second emblem carved above the stone gate of White Heron Hall.
Ilyra stopped in front of a row of six heavy, iron-bound oak chests whose lids stood propped open for the return tally. The insides of the chests were lined with padded grey felt stained with green quarry dust, and burned into the front plank of every chest was the spread-winged heron crest of her own sect, co-signed in red lacquer by Elder Vane, Quartermaster of the Upper Quarry.
