Built seventy years ago by the valley wool guild to shelter drovers caught in early autumn blizzards, the shepherd’s winter hospice sat tucked inside a crescent of dry-stacked fieldstone walls where the wind passed thirty feet overhead through the cedar crowns. Inside, the single long ward room held four sturdy cedar-plank beds raised off the flat stone slab floor against the damp, a deep fieldstone hearth fitted with a swinging iron crane and a three-gallon copper kettle. A dry root cellar stocked only with split birch cordwood and two sacks of coarse salt.
At the outer gatepost, the two young White Heron shrine guards loaned by Commander Arel Fen finished their tin cups of hot barley water, handed the cups back to Mother Renn without asking a single question about where the group would travel next, and marched briskly back up the western gorge footpath to rejoin their post before sundown. Their footsteps faded into the dripping mist. Then, Daro Kesh slid the heavy oak cross-bar into the gate brackets and stepped into the ward room. It shook melted snow from his dark wool coat.
Within ten minutes of crossing the threshold, Mina established the uncontested cold and exact law of the building. While Mother Renn got a roaring birch fire going under the copper kettle and Pera helped lift Vey, Tov. Maren onto the three inner cedar beds closest to the hearth chimney, Mina hung four boiled linen sheets from the ceiling rafters to box in the warmth around…
