By mid-morning, the sun climbed above the eastern crags without warming the dark rock ledges. Nara remained on the pine needle shelf above the shelters, watching Mother Renn trudge up the switchback trail with a wicker basket of clean linen rolls and willow-bark packets braced against her hip. Seventy winters had stooped Renn’s shoulders, and twenty years of searching for her son Aven’s grave had etched deep lines around her mouth. But she stepped onto the muddy terrace with the unrushed certainty of a woman who knew the exact weight of her own basket.
After checking the cooper’s wrist bandage by the low doorway and leaving two packets of fever-bark with the shelter watch, Renn climbed the last twenty paces to the boulder where Nara sat. She didn’t ask about the grey stone tablet resting beside Nara’s thigh. Instead, she uncorked a small clay pot of reed-ash salve and set it on the flat stone between them, reminding Nara that the dry wind off the ridge would split the newly healed skin along her back if she sat in the cold until noon.
Nara looked at the clay pot, then down at the valley floor where the old road wound toward the ruined Monastery of the Last Question. For three hundred years, she had carried a merciless rule inside her own breast. Any harm in the valleys that her Crown training could conceivably have prevented was proof that she had no right to lay down her burden or walk away.
