With practiced, unrushed fingers, Mother Renn removed one of the twenty-seven uncarved river stones from the limestone shelf and set the narrow cedar tablet bearing Aven’s name into its place, right between the caravan driver Pel’s oak marker and the leftover row of nameless siege stones. Then she used the uncarved river pebble she had just lifted to wedge the base of the cedar slip firmly against the back of the niche so no gust from the ravine could tip it over.
Beside her, Daro Kesh knelt on one knee. He set the small iron fire bowl on a flat stone slab. Then he drew an ordinary steel striker and a piece of grey flint from his belt pouch. Daro could have kindled dry tinder in half a heartbeat with a flick of his cultivated breath. Even so, he struck the flint with his bare knuckles three times until a mundane red spark caught in the char-cloth. He blew the ember gently into a twist of dry cedar bark, lit three thin sticks of incense. Then he handed them to Renn with both hands.
While the three thin sticks of high-mountain cedar incense burned steadily in the small iron fire bowl Daro had lit with his flint striker, the five of them stood in the lee of the limestone cliff and listened to the wind moving through the hemlock crowns overhead. Down in the ravine below the road, ice-melt water trickled under a crust of frozen snow with a sound…
