By the trembling yellow flame of the animal fat dip, Davren lifted the thick ash walking stick and laid it horizontally across his lap. That turned the smooth, pale wood until the firelight caught the deep carvings just below the shoulder grip. The grain of the mountain ash was dense, hard. Then he darkened by months of palm sweat and stone dust. But the cut marks were clean, sharp-edged, and clearly intentional.
The wood itself had been harvested from a wind-stunted ash tree growing in a rock fissure on the high western rim, cut with a dull timber saw and seasoned over the communal hearth for three months before Davren took a draw-knife to the bark. Working with a broken skinning blade whose tip he had reground on an oilstone, he had shaped the grip to match the exact hollow of his right palm. That left the lower shaft thick and heavy as an iron pry-bar to bear the brunt of his dead weight.
Near the top of the shaft, centered where a man’s thumb naturally rested when leaning forward against the grade, was the familiar split triangle. The symbol was matching to the one Kezra had tracked across eighty miles of contested wilderness. An equilateral triangle whose right base leg had been deliberately cut and rotated three degrees outward. He formed an open notch that pointed downward.
