The morning of the seventy-fourth day broke with the clean, sharp radiance of high height. Emerging from the narrow defiles of the northern watershed, the expedition stepped into a broad, wind-scoured pass known to mountain drovers as the Hawk’s Notch. Here, perched five thousand feet above the plains where the stunted junipers gave way to bare alpine shale, stood the Independent Mountain Way-Station. A massive, fortified quadrangle of dry-laid dark grey rock and split slate, buttressed against winter avalanches by heavy earthen castle walls.
For the first time since crossing into Hushwood eight days ago, Kezra Venn walked through an open gate where no sentry leveled a crossbow.
The station was an ancient highland refuge, founded two hundred years earlier by the free drovers’ guild and the northern slate quarrymen. It owed allegiance neither to the country governors of the south nor to Marshal Solvan Krail’s Cairn Host in the east. It existed to serve the high caravans. The salt trains, the lead freighters, and the wool trains that crossed the Spine before the autumn blizzards sealed the passes. Its thick oak gates, heavy with hand-hammered copper plates, were barred at sundown against wolves and bandits, but to any traveler who respected the highland peace, its hearths offered warmth without interrogation.
