Dawn on Day 71 broke in pale, watery silver over the eastern shoulders of the Spine, burning the white rime of frost from the fern brakes. Guided by Bram’s silent, unrushed stride, the expedition marched three miles north from the inside charcoal bench, following an ancient hunters’ cross that wound along the middle contours of the ridge.
They didn’t speak. The damp morning air carried the pine-scented scent of wet pine bark and cold stone, mingled with the faint, sour tang that Bram had described the night before.
Even before Kezra Venn unstrapped her brass sighting frame, the boundary of Ulvan Dret’s military exchange announced itself through an eerie, sharp-angled wrongness in the forest.
Across a broad, north-sloping terrace of slick blue clay, a massive sixty-four-pace square of mature Austrian black pines stood surrounded by a younger forest of pale birch scrub, mountain ash, and stunted hemlock. The contrast was jarring to any trained eye. Eighty-foot evergreen giants with four-foot trunks rose suddenly out of a hillside of low, slender saplings, their borders lined up so exactly to the cardinal points that the woodland looked as if it had been stamped into the mountain with a giant iron die.
“Hold the cart here,” Kezra said quietly, raising her hand to halt Fellis and Paxa fifty paces south of the boundary.
