The wind on the limestone shelf seemed to drop for a brief second. That left only the distant, hollow roar of meltwater rushing through the floor of the gorge. Kezra Venn stood six paces from the chalk line, her right hand resting on the handle of Davren’s work knife at her belt.
For eighteen months, since the morning her younger brother had walked out of Kilnstep with an ash walking staff and an adventurer tester’s brass token, Alderfast had been an unchecked rumor. She had followed his trail through tavern ledgers, across fiery ash fields, into the bitter salt dust of Saltglass, and up through the resin forests of Hushwood. She had found his split-triangle marks cut into stone steps, scratched beside drainage lintels. Then she stamped on caravan debt tokens. But every mark she had touched was weeks or months old. A trace left by a ghost who might have died of cold, rockfall, or fever thirty miles before she ever reached his tracks.
“Answer me, Ulvan,” Kezra said, her voice steady despite the hammer of her pulse. “Not as an officer’s recruiter, and not with an office evasion. Is my brother alive, and are there living people in that basin?”
