The dawn that broke over the Needlehouse on the eighty-first day was the color of scraped horn. Wind came off the northern cirques without moisture, thin and bitterly cold. He carried the fine dust of shattered granite across the threshold of the outer shelter. It smelled of frost, wet slate. The faint, rotten-egg bite of dried lichen that had clung to the upper crag for a hundred years without sunlight.
Kezra Venn didn’t light the iron fire bowl. They had agreed on that before midnight. A column of pale woodsmoke rising into the clear dawn air would be visible from the switchbacks of the Coldwork trail ten miles below. Captain Hest Vale’s scouts were trained to watch the high ridge-lines for exactly such domestic careless signed names. Instead, Kezra set four cold iron cups on the flat slab of split hard speckled granite that served as their table, poured melt-water from the stone water tank. Then they placed a dry oatcake beside each cup.
Yseld Arken sat on the low bench opposite the hearth. She wore her coarse homespun wool tunic. But her leather shoulder harness, her short spear, and her hooked ash staff were absent. In accordance with her own terms agreed upon the night before, she had laid every weapon and climbing iron in the dry corner behind Paxa’s medical chest. Her hands rested flat on the chilled surface of the table, open and unclenched. The knuckles were scarred with white ridges from old rope-burns and frost-nipped skin…
