Mother Renn shut the outer cedar door quickly behind the newcomer and guided him to the wooden bench beside the ward stove. Meanwhile, Daro Kesh and Ilyra stepped in from the porch with their hands on their weapons until they saw the boy’s face. He wasn’t an Aperture Court soldier. He was a seventeen-year-old kitchen and fire bowl attendant from the Hollow Summit’s lower pilgrim shrine, his hempen trousers stiff with frozen slush from the high timber slides and his fingers chapped raw from steering a firewood sled down the back gullies to bypass the eastern road barrier.
“Master Daro? Healer Mina?” the shrine servant panted, holding his numb hands toward the stove iron while reaching inside his quilted vest with his elbow. “The outer gate keeper with the big ash staff—Master Bel Sar—checked my sled at the arch and let me come straight to the southern ward once I showed him the oiled medicine paper you left at the summit supply door.”
Daro Kesh stepped forward, recognizing the boy as one of the quiet mountain attendants who had carried hot water buckets to the tester vault before Reth Mal arrived. “You came down from Chief Examiner Vaska Ren’s side of the lower shrine?” Daro asked sharply. “Is Senn alive?”
