Kezra leaned her elbows on the rough frame stand boards, her land-mapper’s gaze focusing with painful recognition on the salt-stained thick parchment strip. Across the surface, drawn in dark nut-dark oak-ink that had faded to dull copper, were the clear landmarks of the northern Saltglass fringe. The jagged dark rock chimneys known as the Three Sisters, the skin-burning bitter salt sinkholes of the White Sump. The dry river-bed wash where Joric Thane’s freight drovers sometimes watered their mules at the deep seep-wells.
Fifty days earlier, Kezra and her companions had crossed that exact wasteland. She remembered the blinding, eye-searing glare of the salt crust, the bitter chemical dust that split her lips and coated her throat like powdered lime. The desperate, wild hours before she unlocked Reach rank and forced fresh water through the dark rock cap. To see that same landscape charted on her brother’s paper, with his familiar angular handwriting noting the waterless stages, made the hair on her arms prickle.
“The eastern goat track isn’t a trail,” Davren explained, his finger tracing a dangerous, zigzagging line that climbed out of the Alderfast bowl over a knife-edge limestone saddle. “It’s a series of frost-shattered ledges barely four inches wide, dropping nine hundred feet into the scree gullies on the desert side. In December, the ledges are glazed with verglas—clear, invisible ice formed by freezing fog. I took two empty water-skins, four oat-cakes, and Father’s brass compass. It took me sixteen hours of belly-crawling through the crags to reach…
