For three hundred years, since the night the nine cloisters of the Listening Crown burned along the upper reaches of the White Spine, Nara Soth had carried a single, secret poison under her ribs.
It wasn’t the ash-fever that had taken her left arm at the shoulder during the third encirclement, nor was it the slow turning to stone of the dorsal channels across her scarred back that made every winter morning feel as though someone had sewn cold iron wire under her shoulder blades. Those were merely physical debts. The ordinary price of surviving a war that everyone else had lost.
The real poison was the quiet, unshakable certainty that she was the last adult left in a world of children.
Nara stood in the doorway of the dark rock recess. Meanwhile, the eight silver ribs of Heaven’s Measure waited silently overhead. She felt that old, familiar certainty wrap around her chest like a warm cloak on a freezing night. Behind her in the cramped shelter stood seven people whose combined ages didn’t equal two-thirds of the years she had spent walking the high ridges alone. Ilyra’s right thumb was split to the muscle and her ash spear was snapped down to an eighteen-inch stub. Hall Mistress Soran’s wrists were purple with deep tendon bruising. Her only weapon was a bent length of low-country iron. Seyun’s collarbones were scored with pale, inward marks that burned whenever the sky tilted. Daro Kesh’s heavy sword had three fresh notches near the…
