Dawn on the ninety-ninth day broke with a cold, pale yellow clarity that cut through the mountain mist like a sharpened chisel. Frost lay thick across the thirty-foot rubble ramp that choked the old northern road. That turned the loose quarry stones into slick, dangerous traps.
Kezra Venn and Yseld Arken walked up the ramp in single file. Yseld took the lead. Her wire-bound climbed staff planted with deliberate care on the uphill side of every boulder. From the hooked iron head of the staff fluttered a two-foot strip of bleached white linen—the traditional highland symbol of a route-parley, recognized by every mountain clan and royal guard post since the first cart roads were cut through the Spine.
Behind Yseld, Kezra carried her canvas instrument case across her chest and her jointed brass-shod sounding rod in her right hand. Her coat was buttoned tight, her boots laced to the calf. Her bonded survey notebook rested in its waxed inner pocket, its leather covers warming slightly against her ribs as she climbed higher onto the ancient hard speckled granite stone base.
Up close, the stonework of Stonewake Citadel was overwhelming in its mass. The outer curtain wall rose forty feet into the pale sky, built of dressed hard speckled granite blocks four feet thick. It was bound with hard grey lime mortar that had weathered into an unbroken stone face. Above the gate, the square outer gatehouse towers jutted out ten paces from the wall, their arrow-slits commanding every inch of…
