In the early afternoon, Ilyra led Bel Sar a quarter-mile below the seal court to the narrow hillside junction where the upper shepherd paths came together with the mule track leading down to the valley settlement. On their left rose a forty-foot cliff of layered grey shale scarred by recent frost splits. On their right dropped a steep scree gully tufted with thorny gorse. Four days earlier, along a slope just like this one, Ilyra had escorted Kes’s medicine run under a pale blade and cracked the shaft of her spear reaching Early Jade.
Behind them came Pera, Kes, and two other recovering testers—Maren and Tov—carrying weighted wicker baskets filled with firewood and bundled blankets to simulate families evacuating with winter provisions and small children.
Bel looked up at the overhanging shale lip, then planted his iron-shod staff across the widest section of the trail next to an outcrop of granite. “In Ash Reed’s mountain manual,” the older man said, measuring the choke point with a practiced eye, “when rockfall or raiders threaten a pass, the staff keeper locks his rear heel against that granite spur, holds a five-foot roof over the lee niche, and keeps the non-combatants crouched behind the stone until the sky clears.”
