Morning frost clung to the lichen on the split granite boulder above the ruined hillside shrine. Nara Soth sat with her empty left sleeve tucked securely into her belt and Master Uren’s grey stone tablet resting flat across her knee. Since walking out of the abandoned seal court at sunrise with the prize Seyun had yielded rather than take by self-injury, she hadn’t channeled a single thread of Crown breath into the stone. One hard squeezing of her right palm would have snapped the slate along its ancient stone veins and ended the last physical record of the Counterpoise Sect forever. Yet the stone remained unbroken under her fingers. Meanwhile, the noise of hammers and splitting wedges rose from the muddy terrace forty paces below.
Down in the clearing where the first pale blade had demolished the village shrine three days earlier, fourteen White Heron townspeople were working in the cold mud. None of them looked toward the high ridge to see whether the white-haired woman who had survived the Hollow Summit approved of their layout. Two teenage boys dragged scorched cedar floor beams out of the rubble heap and scraped the charcoal from the sound heartwood with drawknives. Beside them, the village cooper—whose right hand had been crushed beneath a falling top door beam during the shrine collapse and amputated cleanly at the wrist by Mina—knelt in the damp shale with his bandaged stump tucked into a coarse linen sling.
