Kezra was the first to crawl through the breached window opening.
Squeezing her shoulders through the twenty-inch gap beneath the rock blocked path, she slid her boots out onto a flat stone ledge on the far side, pushed herself forward on hands and knees. Then she stood up in the pale, diffuse daylight of the seventy-fifth morning.
One by one, her companions followed. Yseld eased Fellis through the opening with careful care, supporting his braced left forearm. Meanwhile, Paxa guided his boots from below. Fellis moved with slow, deliberate care. That kept his broken limb tucked tight against his ribs, his breath steady despite the tightness of the passage. Within five minutes, all four travelers stood together upon the flat stone slabs of one of the most extraordinary geographical spaces in the entire mountain chain. The Trapped Court of Needlehouse.
It was an enclosed, roofless stone quadrangle, twenty-four paces wide and thirty paces long, trapped deep inside the mountain shoulder. Towering upright cliff walls rose on all four sides to a height of eighty feet, enclosing the space like a huge stone chimney. Above their heads, framed by the jagged precipices of living rock, was an irregular opening of pale, milky-grey mountain sky across which thin wisps of subalpine cloud drifted in the high wind.
