Instructors Venn and Tarn hung a heavy oiled tarpaulin across the broken arch of the pilgrim shelter to block the worst of the night draft. Meanwhile, Mina lit a tiny smokeless fire bowl of charcoal pellets so the seven of them could sit without their teeth chattering. On the flat hearth-stone at the center of the circle, Hall Mistress Soran unrolled a weathered, crease-whitened sheet of heavy mulberry paper.
Drawn across the sheet in faded land-mapper’s charcoal was a height map of the northern ridge. Not the clean, blueprint diagram Osen had sketched in the ash at Ash Reed. But a field map annotated twenty winters ago in a young woman’s brisk hand. Seyun leaned forward beside Mina, noting how the ink along the upper margin was blistered and watermarked as if it had been carried through scalding sleet.
“Twenty winters ago, in the eleventh month of the old registry,” Soran said, placing the tip of her gloved index finger on a narrow gallery carved into the northern cliff face above the service ledge, “I had held Early Jade for less than a year. I wasn’t yet Mistress of White Heron Hall. My predecessor, Mistress Hael, was ill with lung-rot. When the Aperture Court sent an urgent sealed summons requesting two Jade spear-holders to help with a ‘seasonal fracture in the northern sky barrier,’ I volunteered to lead our hall’s contingent.”
