For a long breath nobody inside the limestone cleft spoke. Even Yseld, who had marched through the northern passes in another life under Cairn Host pennons, rested her chin on her gloved knuckles and stared across the half-mile hollow as the early sun struck the upper stonework of the castle.
Stonewake Citadel was not small. Its outer curtain wall of dark, dressed hard speckled granite rose thirty feet above the southern rubble ramp. It was flanked by square corner watchtowers whose slated roofs and iron fire-baskets gleamed against the pale mountain sky. Behind the outer ward stood a squat, thick-shouldered inner keep and a cluster of slate-roofed barracks, storehouses, and smoking bakehouse chimneys, all flying the grey-and-iron banner of Marshal Solvan Krail. To an ordinary traveler, an upland peddler, or a lowland caravan guard, the castle looked like the total master of the pass—an unmoving iron wedge driven into the throat of Alderfast.
To Kezra’s map maker’s eye, however, the towers and curtain walls looked almost like wooden children’s blocks set upon an infinitely larger, older table.
Beneath the grey stonework of the citadel lay a vast, artificially planed bench of living mountain bedrock. The shelf spanned more than a thousand paces from the eastern snowmelt ravine to the western cliff drop, cut straight across the natural grain of the tilted limestone and dark hard speckled granite strata. Where the surrounding peaks rose in jagged, frost-splintered ribs tilted at forty degrees toward the sky, the foundation under Stonewake had been…
