A howling blizzard swept down from the high crags of the Karst Ridge on the fifth night of the siege, burying the Ashen Plains under eight inches of drifting, soot-grey snow.
The storm was a temporary mercy. In the sub-zero gale, General Brand’s mortar crews couldn’t keep their touchholes dry, and the sulfur-mastiffs refused to leave their straw pits in the lower camp. Along the castle walls of Fort Karst, only solitary sentries wrapped in three layers of boiled wool paced the low roof walls, their breath freezing into icicles on their steel visors.
In the small, vaulted back kitchen behind the Great Hall—the only room in the keep whose hearth chimney pipe was not blocked by mortar rubble—four men and a girl sat around a scarred pine table.
It was the first time since the flight from Low-Khorat that all three burned selves were showed up outside the Speculum at the same time.
At the head of the table sat Vane Vale. The merchant had draped his velvet coat over his shoulders like an opera cape. It held a chipped wooden bowl containing three fingers of grey barley gruel and two boiled turnip wedges. He stared at the gruel with the offended dignity of an ambassador who had just been served sewage in a royal court.
