Master Uren’s grey slate tablet weighed twelve pounds. A flat, unpolished slab of deep mountain stone no wider than a forearm, scored with the silver-filled diagram of the three return places and the ancient script of the Answering Spirit vein. Nara Soth cradled the stone against her right forearm while holding her walking staff against her hip, her thumb resting directly over the center engraving where Place III was marked below the chest bone.
She didn’t need her walking staff or a mason’s hammer to finish what she had sworn at the Hollow Summit pillar. A single unthrottled pulse of her joined Crown intentions through her thumb would shatter the twelve-pound slate into grey powder on the flat stone slabs in less than half a breath.
Yet as the first red-gold rays of sunrise cleared the eastern ridge and lit the frost between the twenty-four eight-sided pillars, Nara didn’t clench her hand. Instead, she stood in the center of the empty ring looking across at Seyun, who remained two paces outside the pillars leaning lightly on his ash staff while closing his Account Book.
Sunrise turned the mist between the granite pillars from silver to pale gold. Then, Nara Soth reached up with her single right hand, slipped the braided hemp loop off the top of Master Uren’s twelve-pound grey slate tablet. Then she lowered the stone into the crook of her right arm alongside her walking staff. For three days since leaving the Hollow Summit—and for twenty winters before…
