In the early afternoon, while Ilyra and Bel Sar held the watch at the seal court with Soran, Mother Renn led a small, quiet party half a mile down the eastern spur to where the old mountain burial road curved below the ruined Abbey of the Last Question. With her walked Seyun, Mina, Daro Kesh, and—ten paces behind them along the pine-needle margin—Nara Soth.
The road here was the same ancient, frost-heaved track Seyun had walked in the rain on the day after his expulsion from Ash Reed. Just then, he had possessed nothing but three copper needles, an empty satchel, and eleven years of bitterness. Just below the bend stood the cracked stone funerary shrine where he had first met Ilyra and spoken the old burial phrase to free her pinned White Heron spear.
As Mother Renn, Seyun, Mina, Daro Kesh, and Nara Soth walked down the eastern spur toward the old abbey burial road, the noise of the seal court—the ring of Bel Sar’s staff against Keth Or’s practice sword and the scrape of boots on gravel—faded behind the shoulder of the ridge. Down here under the tall mountain hemlocks and stunted pines, the snow from five days ago still lay in shaded white drifts along the ditch, untouched since the morning the party had climbed up from the lower shrine.
