The clatter of Adra Pike’s iron alarm pan carried across the tiered terraces with the flat, urgent rhythm of a harvest muster. There was no shrieking in the lanes of Alderfast, nor the confused milling that Kezra remembered from the border skirmishes near Kilnstep when armed riders first appeared on the pasture skyline. For eighteen months the one hundred and twenty-six residents of this trapped mountain basin had lived beneath the stone brow of Stonewake Citadel. They knew the sound of a raid. They had drilled its remedy until each household moved by rote.
From the common hall doorway, Adra Pike stepped out into the frosty lane, her dark wool cloak pinned at the shoulder with a grower’s bone skewer and a heavy iron-headed terrace mattock resting against her forearm. Her voice cut through the cold air without straining, pitched to carry down the stonework terraces to the tool sheds where the morning work crews were gathering.
“Tool shelters on the lower bench,” Adra called out. She pointed with her mattock toward the thick-walled stone storage houses built into the lower limestone face. “Nurses, children, and everyone on sticks into the cedar chambers. Bar the timber shutters and set the floor bolts. Cressa has the compost cart across the fourth stair. We hold the second gap until the quarry horn sounds.”
