Two hours before dawn on Day 119, the high mountain wind fell into a vast, crystal stillness.
Inside the canvas tent, the breathing of Paxa Sel and miner Voss was slow, deep, and rhythmic. She was wrapped in their heavy shearling bedrolls. Kezra Venn pulled the horn toggle on the door-flap and stepped quietly out into the bitter alpine cold, tying the drawstrings of her sheepskin hood beneath her chin.
Yseld Arken stood already waiting on the frost-heaved dark rock flags of the cut highway. Her dark was dark shape framed against the vast sweep of the northern stars. In her left hand she held her hooked climbing staff. Her right hand rested upon the iron curb stone where the old royal paving met the snapped granite cliff edge.
Neither of them spoke for a long time. At two thousand four hundred and sixty paces height, human speech felt small and fragile against the huge, ringing quiet of the Spine.
Kezra turned and looked back to the south.
Down in the deep trough of the mountains, eight miles behind them, the Alderfast basin lay hidden beneath a sea of cold white fog that pooled like milk between the ridges. Far below that mist, Kezra knew the thirty-foot granite castle wall of her second Quarter exchange stood unmoving across the northern defile. She held the pass closed against Marshal Krail’s cavalry.
