The reach ended in the middle of the road, and nobody could see where.
Sella knew it was there because her teeth told her so. For three days the leash had been a dull ache at the back of the jaw, the kind of pressure a bad tooth gives before the weather turns, and the Hold’s voices had grown thin in her head with every mile of the crest, like a bell rung in another valley. Now the ache stopped. It did not fade. It stopped, cleanly, as a cord goes slack when someone has cut it at the far end, and she felt the stopping run through her from the crown of her skull to the soles of her boots.
She put her palm flat on the frost and waited for the Hold to come back into her. It did not. The road under her hand was only a road.
“Here,” she said. “The edge is here.”
Ysra stopped beside her with the sling held out from her chest and her face set in the flat, careful look of a Watch who has been told the stair is about to give. “Where?”
“Between the third stone and the fourth. You stepped across it just now, when you turned your head to look at the gorse.” Sella did not look up from the ground. “Harrow would count it for you if you asked him. I would rather you asked me. I have the bone-ledger, and he has only the stones…
