The freezing gorge wind continued to scour the high castle walls of Stonewake Citadel, whining through the crenellations and throwing fine needles of rime against Kezra Venn’s sheepskin mantle. Behind her, the massive bulk of the keep rose into the starless mountain dark, an imposing mass of dressed granite whose lower tiers glowed with the steady, dull amber of castle fire bowls. On the narrow coping beside the eastern air-flow turret, Cartographer Ulvan Dret remained seated on his granite bollard, his shoulders hunched beneath his heavy traveling cloak, his gloved fingers resting on his ruined left knee.
He had tucked the backdated supply order back into his wool lining. But the bitter, cynical challenge in his watery old eyes had not faded. For forty years, Ulvan had watched junior officers and ambitious mapmakers arrive in the mountain marches with spotless ideals. He had watched the grinding rig of the Cairn Host wear them down to pliant functionaries or broken corpses. He didn’t look at Kezra with contempt, but with the weary sadness of a man who had already buried his own younger self beneath decades of office compromise.
“You speak of truth as though it were an iron plumb-bob that hangs straight regardless of who’s shooting the angle, Mistress Venn,” Ulvan said, his raspy voice pitched low so it wouldn’t travel past the turret embrasure to the two sentries stamping their boots on the gravel ramp below. “You stand here at twenty-four, with sound lungs and two live addresses in…
