Night fell over the outer ledge like an iron gate dropping across a drop-gate. The mist in the eastern couloir rose as the heat plunged. It wrapped the cliff face in a dense, freezing shroud of white vapor that smelled of wet slate, rotten-egg lichen, and the bitter cold of the high peaks.
The four of them sat huddled together in the dry recess beneath the limestone overhang. They lit no fire. They had agreed on that before the twilight faded: even the nearly invisible smoke of dry dwarf-willow would be trapped beneath the rock lip, pooling until it spilled out into the gorge where a sharp-eyed picket on the high low roof walls might spot its pale blue smudge against the dark.
Instead, they ate in total silence. Paxa distributed four pieces of dried smoked mutton, two hard ship’s biscuits wrapped in wool rags to muffle the crunch of chewing. A shared cup of ice-cold melt-water from the stone canteen. The meat was tough as shoe leather, salty enough to burn the tongue. But it provided the dense calories their shivering bodies needed to generate body-energy heat against the subalpine frost.
Kezra sat with her right side pressed against the upright rock face, her ear touching a smooth, unweathered vein of crystal-clear white spar-stone that ran through the limestone.
