By nightfall, the sleet had begun to patter against the oiled sheepskin windows of the tool shed, drumming a steady, hollow rhythm that matched the tension in the room. A single animal fat lamp burned in the center of the large worktable. It cast long, wavering shadows across the maps spread out before Kezra, Adra Pike, Yseld, Davren, and miner Voss.
Between them lay the large brass-rubbed plates that Kezra had carried out of Nym Correl’s archive in the Needlehouse, their sharp-angled lines and ancient survey runes gleaming dull gold in the lamplight. Beside them, Davren had pinned his own hand-drawn topographical sheets of the Alderfast basin, carefully annotated with every spring, fault line, and abandoned prospector’s drift he had explored during his eighteen months in the valley.
“Retiring the two garden plots saves the food from a raid,” Kezra said. She leaned over the table with her brass dividers in hand. “But it doesn’t solve the military reality. The main turnpike from Stonewake enters Alderfast through a natural limestone defile three hundred paces wide. If Captain Vale marches down that road with fifty heavy pikemen and an iron-plated mantlet, she can force the cleft, clear our cart barriers, and bottle us up in the lower drifts within two days.”
