The pre-dawn frost had turned the limestone copings of the Needlehouse into dangerous ribbons of white crystal. The air was dead, stripped of all wind, suspended in that brittle mountain silence where a single snapping twig echoes across half a mile of upright hard speckled granite.
Kezra Venn stood on the third rung of the cedar upkeep ladder. Her right ear was pressed against the hairline gap between the heavy timber shutter and the stone reveal. The scent that drifted through the crack was sharp and clear. Stale animal fat grease, cured horsehide. The pungent, chemical bite of sulfur-soaked sulfur-matches used to ignite military slow-matches in damp air.
Above her, on the roof low roof wall directly over the shutter, the frost had been disturbed.
Through the narrow slit, lit up by the dying starlight of Day Eighty-Two, Kezra saw the evidence pressed deep into the rime. A boot print—ten inches long, broad at the heel, and studded with fourteen diamond-headed iron hobnails arranged in the distinctive three-sided pattern of the Cairn Host light infantry. Beside it, the corner of an iron-shod shield rim had scraped the mortar. That left a fresh, chalky groove across the three-hundred-year-old cut stone.
The Host check party was not two marches away down the northern timber road. They hadn’t waited for the morning fog to burn off the lowlands. Captain Hest Vale had pushed her lead scouts through the night, scaling the lower switchbacks twelve hours ahead of the supply boss’s schedule.
