At dawn on Day 110, the mountain air was biting, crystal-clear, and smelled of frost-whitened shale and cold birch smoke. High on the eastern ridge shoulder overlooking the northern defile, Yseld Arken crouched behind a dwarf juniper bush with three basin lookouts. She held a small polished tin mirror. Through her brass spyglass, she caught the metal glint of sixty polished iron helmets moving down the military turnpike from Stonewake Citadel.
Captain Hest Vale had not sent scouts this time. She was marching at the head of a full combat cohort. Four squads of veteran pikemen with sixteen-foot ash shafts, two squads of heavy arbalesters carrying steel-bowed crossbows on their pack-frames, and ten tunnel diggers leading two draft bullocks that dragged an iron-plated mantlet on solid wooden wheels. The guard post was advancing with deliberate, textbook discipline, intending to seize the northern defile and fortify both terrace approaches before midday.
Yseld tilted her tin mirror toward the sun, flashing three sharp, rhythmic pulses of white light across the two-mile breadth of the valley floor toward the southern quarry.
Two miles south, standing on the frost-dusted pale limestone doorstep beside the Southern Quarry Cut’s southeastern corner anchor (Circuit 37), Kezra Venn saw the flash.
