The stone signpost at the southern fork had stood at the junction of the mountain burial road and the coastal highway for a hundred years, its east face carved with the distance to Oran’s river gates and its south face pointing forty leagues down the valley toward the port of Saltmere. The late-afternoon sun had dropped low over the western hills, turning the dry grass along the ditch to copper and stretching the shadow of the signpost twenty paces across the gravel.
Nara Soth leaned lightly against the warm granite post, her single right hand resting on the contoured ash grip of Ilyra’s walking staff. Seyun approached down the slope with the mattock slung over his right shoulder. Then, she looked at the empty leather loop on his pack where the tarnished silver wire scraps had been crushed and discarded, and nodded once in quiet understanding.
“You left the cellar open?” she asked.
“Wedged the trapstone with two blocks and swept the stone stand bare,” Seyun said, stopping beside her at the edge of the highway. “If a woodcutter goes down there out of the rain next winter, all he’ll find is a dry floor.”
Nara looked back up the pine-shadowed ridge toward the upper shrine where Master Uren’s bones now lay in the earth near Aven’s plaque. Then she turned her scarred, weathered face fully toward Seyun in the amber light.
