Kezra reached into her breast pocket with fingers that remained remarkably steady. Even so, the skin across her knuckles was white with cold.
From her oiled leather satchel, she drew out a small block of dark shoemaker’s beeswax and a fresh strip of heavy, unsized rag paper. She laid the paper flat across the pale limestone riser, pressing her palm against the corners to smooth out the creases caused by the mountain wind.
“Hold the edges, Fellis,” she said.
Fellis leaned his broad bulk against the stone, his calloused thumbs pinning the top and bottom of the paper against the limestone. “Got it. Still as a graveyard.”
Kezra held the cake of beeswax in her right hand and began to rub the flat edge across the paper with firm, slanted strokes.
Slowly, as the dark wax adhered to the raised grain of the linen fibers, the negative space of the chisel cut emerged in crisp, dark relief. First the broad outer base of the triangle—two inches wide, cut with a sure, heavy mallet stroke that had snapped cleanly through a stone-hard crinoid stem. Then the central dividing bar, dropping true and plumb from the apex to the center of the base.
And finally, the angled strokes of the two outer sides.
Kezra lifted the paper and held it up against the grey midday sky. That let the cold mountain light shine through the wax-soaked fibers.
There, in the upper right angle of the central clean cut, was a tiny irregularity. A tiny, V-shaped notch barely the width of a pinhead. There, the right corner of the chisel’s cutting edge had been nicked.
Kezra knew that nick.
It was her father’s three-quarter-inch cold chisel. Davren had been twelve years old. Then, helping their father rough-dress the foundation sills for the pottery drying shed behind the kilns, he had struck a hidden iron tie-pin in an old timber, chipping the hardened steel corner. Their father had refused to grind down the face to remove the flaw, saying a tool that had bitten iron had earned its character. Davren had packed his canvas rucksack eighteen months ago to leave Kilnstep. Then, that nicked chisel was one of three hand tools he had slipped into his leather tool roll.
“It’s Davren’s chisel,” Kezra said. Her voice was quiet, but it had the solid, unbending certainty of granite. “Not a copy. Not someone imitating his style. He swung the mallet that cut this mark.”
Fellis let out a long whoop of relief that bounced off the dark rock cliffs across the gorge. He slapped his gloved thigh and pointed thirty paces upslope. There, the spur merged back into the main mountain wall.
“Then look up there!” Fellis shouted, his face glowing with excitement. “Look at the chute above the cairn! He marked the stairs. He left his iron pins to lead us right over the top!”
Kezra followed his pointing arm.
Above the spur, a steep, narrow scree chute rose at a punishing forty-degree angle, cutting straight through the black fiery castle walls toward the high notch of the ridge. And marching up the center of that chute, spaced at regular ten-pace intervals, was a neat, orderly line of glinting metal pins.
They were heavy iron guide stakes, three feet long and an inch thick. Their round forged heads shone brightly in the midday sun. Each stake was driven upright into the dark scree. It formed a clear, official-looking line of ascents. The kind of trail markers a royal engineer or road crew might leave to mark an open pass through broken country.
“He found a way up,” Fellis said, grinning at Yseld. “He cut his mark on the stone, drove his guide pins, and climbed straight through to the other side. It’s a road, Kezra! He built a road for us!”
Kezra didn’t look at the iron stakes.
She was still looking at the wax rubbing in her hands. She drew her brass dividers from her leather case. She opened the screw until the needle points matched the length of the triangle’s right-hand stroke. Then she locked the measuring tongs.
Then she swung the dividers to the left-hand stroke.
The brass needle didn’t reach the apex. It stopped a full quarter of an inch short.
Kezra looked closer, turning the paper to catch the light at an oblique angle. The stone beneath the gap was smooth, unbroken limestone. The chisel had not slipped. There was no faint scratch where a mason had tried and failed to complete the cut. The mason had deliberately lifted his chisel, left a quarter-inch gap between the slanted line and the peak of the triangle, and laid down his mallet.
The breath went out of Kezra in a slow, cold realization.
She was fourteen years old again. She stood on the red clay banks behind her mother’s pottery workshop on a rainy autumn afternoon. Davren was eleven, his homespun smock smeared with damp river mud, his dark hair plastered to his forehead by the drizzle. They had spent three hours mapping the rabbit trails through the dense briar patches that choked the old clay pits, trying to find a dry route to the upland orchard without tangling their clothes in the thorny vines.
Davren had found a wide, clear path that looked as broad as a cart track, and had proudly taken his pocketknife to notch an arrow into a birch trunk.
Kezra had caught his wrist, just as their father had caught hers years before.
Never close the mark if you haven’t seen the other side, she had told him. She tapped his cold knuckles with a wooden ruler. A rabbit trail that looks broad at the mouth might end in a badger’s den or a three-fathom sinkhole. If you draw a complete arrow, someone following behind you will trust it with their footing. If you aren’t sure where it comes out, shorten the top stroke. An open mark is a question. A closed mark is a promise.
They had used that code for four years, scratching open marks on uncertain clay seams and timber cuts across the entire Kilnstep parish.
Davren had not forgotten.
“It’s not a road,” Kezra said.
Fellis stopped in mid-stride, his smile faltering. “What do you mean? The mark is right there. The triangle—”
“Look at the apex, Fellis,” Kezra said. She held the paper before his eyes and tapping the gap with the brass point of her dividers. “The left stroke stops short. He left a quarter-inch gap.”
Fellis squinted at the paper, his heavy brow furrowing. “Maybe his chisel slipped. Or the stone was too hard.”
“He cut through a crinoid fossil on the base,” Kezra replied. “The stone wasn’t too hard. And Davren never slipped with a mallet. He had hands like an anchor-smith.” She turned to face Yseld and Paxa, who were watching her with quiet, unblinking intensity. “When we were children, we had an agreement. If we found a trail that looked inviting but hadn’t been walked to its conclusion, we left the upper stroke open. It meant: Suspect this line. An unchecked route. A question, not a promise.”
Fellis stared at her, then looked back toward the neat line of gleaming iron stakes marching up the scree chute. “Why would he question it? The pins are right there. Solid iron, hammered into the hill.”
“Did Davren carry twelve iron guide stakes when he left Kilnstep?” Yseld asked, her voice cutting like an edge of slate.
Kezra shook her head. “He had three setting pins of rolled tin for his shelter, and one iron sounding rod. He didn’t carry seventy pounds of forged military hardware into the high combs.”
Yseld stepped past them, her scarred hands gripping the center of her ash staff. She walked with the slow, deliberate stalk of a wolf skirting a baited snare, her boots making almost no sound on the black gravel.
She stopped at the mouth of the chute, ten paces above the limestone stairs. There, the first bright iron stake was driven into the scree.
The stake was amazing work. It stood three feet high, with a square, narrowed shank and a heavy round collar near the top, forged with the clean, clockwork uniformity of a royal arsenal. The metal had been coated in clear sheep fat to prevent rust. It reflected the midday light with a hard, greasy sheen. It looked dependable. It looked like safety.
“Stay back on the limestone,” Yseld ordered without turning around. “All three of you.”
She planted her left boot on a firm rib of dark rock that flanked the mouth of the chute. She reached out with her staff. She hooked the curved iron beak beneath the round collar of the first guide stake.
She didn’t pull forward. She braced her weight against the solid rock and levered the staff backward, applying a steady, lateral tension against the iron pin.
Crack.
The sound was not the clean scrape of metal against stone. It was a dull, brittle snap that echoed up the chute like the sound of thin pond ice buckling under a loaded cart.
A hairline fracture shot through the black scree, five paces wide. The entire surface crust of the slope groaned with a deep, sickening shaking that traveled through the soles of their boots.