In the dead hour before midnight, when the camp on the southern Blackglass terrace had grown so cold that the water in the tin mugs froze into thin sheets of brittle ice, Kezra Venn lay awake in her bedroll.
Beside her, Paxa’s breath came in slow, measured rhythms. Fellis murmured once in his sleep, his hand twitching against his sling as he dreamed of ropes, winches, and the great timber derricks of his home village. Outside the triangle of pack frames, Yseld Arken walked her outer edge watch, her boots crunching softly on the fiery gravel every fifty paces, her ash staff clicking with rhythmic regularity against the dark rock stones.
Kezra listened to that footstep.
It was the same footstep that had led them across the knife-edge narrow high walkway of six-sided dark rock two days ago. They tested every greasy ledge before allowing Fellis to put his boot down. It was the same footstep that had launched itself up a crumbling marl shelf on the Knife Ridge. It took a falling three-hundred-pound limestone slab across a bare forearm to shield Fellis from being crushed into the ravine.
In a cheap ballad sung in a village alehouse, a hero who discovered that her guide had hidden a military past would have staged a dramatic midnight face-off. She would have drawn a blade, demanded a full confession under threat of expulsion, or plotted secretly to abandon the traitor at the next crossroads before her loyalty could be questioned.
